McGrath:

Yes, I could have said 80,000, or 120,000--or 200,000 for that matter.

The point of my initial message was the cost/mile approach to cost comparison, not a recommendation of how long to keep a car. My own experience leads me to start getting nervous after 100K, so what I was looking to purchase was the use of a car in the intervening time.

Frankly, in the past I've often kept a car a good bit longer than 100K, as witness the 119,000 on the Caddy I traded in, or the 108K on my B.W.'s LeSabre. I don't put any stock in how many calendar years there may be on a car, but the miles I'll be driving it is what's important to me.

I picked 100K as the earliest I personally would want to change cars next time. YMMV. Literally.

I agree with Q that one needs to pay attention to the condition of each of the candidate vehicles. In my case, the car I bought was a one-owner car, originally bought in Indiana, with the history of consistent regular and frequent service at the same respected dealership where I bought it, with a clear Carfax report. For me, that was convincing enough that I didn't feel the need to take it to my own mechanic. Again, YMMV.

Kendall, yes, selling the Caddy might have produced more than the trade-in. But I knew of a threatening condition in the Caddy, and personally selling to a private buyer would have caused me an ethical problem about disclosing that lurking demon. Adding to that just the hassle of arranging a private sale and so forth, I was happy enough to accept the trade-in offered, which was right on the button of what I expected.

As to Volvos and their ilk, my B.W. was wanting a larger car than those tend to be, and also we emphatically didn't want the center-floorshift-on-an-island format, which was present on so many of the cars I looked at on the web, including Volvos.

Q, I'm in Indianapolis, and the web search found me nine Park Avenues within 25 miles of my ZIP code which might have been acceptable. Whittling away the two most distant got me to seven, and one of those was with a dealership I didn't want to do business with. The cost/mile approach got the remaining six down to three, and we bought the first choice of those.

Dave Oesterreich