The best kind of car: paid for

My ’91 Previa and ’89 Accord aren’t shiny new, but they operate beautifully and even over many years the upkeep is cheaper than car payments.

By Jeff Rundles

As an automobile reviewer and observer lo these many years, it has been my great pleasure to drive a ton of fine cars. As such, people are always asking me car questions – things like, “I’m looking at a ’95 Saab – what’ya think?” The truth is, I don’t have a clue. I knew a ton about the ’95 Saab in ’94 or ’95 when it was new and I wrote a piece about it, but as a reviewer of new cars – which I receive through the press pool from the manufacturers – I don’t know much about dealers or used cars.

Except my own used cars, of course. The fact is that I haven’t personally owned a car for my personal everyday use since the early 1990s, and even then – I bought a brand new 1990 Chevy Corsica in 1989 – I only put about 15,000 miles on my car in the course of four years. But it’s not like I wasn’t around some cars. My wife has a car, and we have been through two vehicles for our children, all of which I drive from time to time.

As you might expect, the car review business has undergone the same kind of economic contraction that is going on in just about every other endeavor these days, and for the first time in nearly 20 years I have had extended periods of “car issues” this year. This is the first year in a long time that I have had several weeks without a review vehicle – in a typical year since 1989, I have been carless approximately 2-3 weeks a year. So in 2009, I have carpooled with my wife, “borrowed” my son’s car, and not a few times I have ridden the RTD Light Rail.

My son has been gone most of the summer on an amazing trip to Africa, which has eased some of the pain, and in the last couple of months I have been driving his car and switching off with my wife in hers, and I got to thinking that this would be a good time to do a review of older cars – my older cars.

Like many people, over the last several years we have thought off and on about getting a new car, what with all the cheap money floating around and the fact that pretty much everyone we knew was sporting new wheels. But we are frugal people, and our primary family vehicles are the kind that everyone envies: paid for. Especially now. In spite of the Cash for Clunkers campaign that has proven to be a boon for new car sales, if a problem for junk dealers and non-profit organizations, and while questions remain at this writing whether the U.S. government will extend the program with additional cash, the observable fact is that most people right now are just standing pat on the car front. The maintenance issues are relatively low-cost, they are getting toward the end of their car payments, and the savings of a few hundred dollars a month in these times is beginning to look a lot better than a shiny new vehicle in the drive.

So here’s a look at my own drive.

1991 Toyota Previa

There was a Garrison Keillor piece on “Prairie Home Companion” many years ago, in “The News From Lake Woebegone” segment, about one of the town’s people who desperately wanted a new car, but being Norwegian, he couldn’t bring himself to do it until the old one died. But the old one refused to die; “lack of maintenance just seemed to encourage it,” Keillor reported. My wife and I feel a bit like that. We have a 1991 Toyota Previa LE minivan with 172,000 miles on it, and while we are fairly diligent about upkeep, it just keeps going and going and going. We have little things from time to time – the windshield wipers, which are kind of huge on this vehicle, recently went haywire – but when you add ‘em all up, the cost per year is way lower than car payments. Plus, the license plates are among the cheapest of any vehicle anywhere, and our insurance agent stopped asking us about comprehensive coverage years ago. “You’d pay more than the car is worth in six months,” I think is what he said, somewhat derisively.

Besides, we like the Previa. It looks like hell, no doubt, but mechanically it is as sound as the day it was new. The vision is beautiful – a great big windshield, large mirrors, plenty of big side windows, and a huge rear window, coupled with a relatively high stance – so it is a great vehicle to drive in traffic and there is no better vehicle on the road when it comes to sightseeing.

Over the years I have driven for review the newer Toyota Sienna minivan, and while I like many things about it, I have never thought that it is a better vehicle than the Previa it replaced. I wondered why Toyota phased out the Previa, not to mention I wondered when it left the American market. We see Previas all over the place, so I just assumed that the vehicle had a many year run; it was obviously popular in its heyday and there are so many of them still on the road you’d think the last year was about 6 years ago. Au contraire.

The Previa debuted on these shores in 1990 as a 1991 model, so as it turns out we have the first American edition. And it only sold through 1997. Seven model years; that really blew my mind because there are as many of them on the road, at least from my more-than-cursory observation, as VW Jettas and Jeep Cherokees, and those models have been or were out for more than 20 years. The Previa was Toyota’s answer to the then-stunning success of the Dodge minivan – Chrysler and Dodge, and then everyone, were making an astonishing amount of money on minivans in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and it just made sense that a car company would enter the market segment. But as it turned out, Toyota rushed in perhaps too quickly.

The Previa was obviously an immediate hit. It featured an engine – a 2.4-liter 4 cylinder with 135 hp (which feels twice that) – that was mounted underneath the front seats, a so-called mid-engine, that gave the rear-wheel-drive Previa unprecedented stability and traction vis a vis the competition. It also made it doubly difficult to service, but then we are talking about a Toyota and – trust me – service issues are few and far between. But oddly enough, the engine location also made it virtually impossible to increase the engine size, and by the mid 1990s Dodge and everyone else began marketing 6-cylinder engines in their minivans with more horsepower, which quickly became the deal-maker, or in the case of Toyota, the deal-breaker, so they came out with the Sienna with a bigger engine and haven’t looked back. The Previa has lived on in other markets – China, Australia – with 2nd and 3rd generations where more horsepower isn’t a chief selling point, and I have seen pictures of these newer vehicles and wish they sold them here.

The Previa was also one of the widest minivans on the market in its heyday, and it has this rounded stance that has led worldwide to its two nicknames: “eggvan” or “bean.” I thought I made that up, as I have always called our white Previa “ the egg,” but as an old friend of mine is wont to say, there’s very little new in the world.

One odd thing about the Previa, and my family has turned it into a game. We love everything about our minivan; it drives beautifully, it seats eight people, the seats fold down with ease, there’s plenty of room behind the rear seat for gear and groceries, the doors are great – everything. But from day one, and my wife bought it used in 1993, the hubcaps just won’t stay on. We’ve tried factory hubcaps, after-market hubcaps, cheap plastic replicas from Target – all of them lasted about three days. It quickly became a joke in our family years ago, and right up to this day we check out every Previa we see – a ton of them – and sure enough, the ones that feature the standard wheels that take hubcaps (options included sport wheels without hubcaps) all have somewhere between one and four hubcaps missing. We saw one once with all the hub caps, but on closer inspection it was clear they just put them on; they’d be gone in a matter of days, no doubt.

The Previa came in six trims, including one with All-Wheel-Drive which I wish we had, ranging from the basic DX to the LE, and we have the LE. Today, according to the websites that calculate such things, our 1991 Previa has a dealer retail price of $1,684, and a private-party value of $818. It’s a great vehicle; I wish I had two of them.

Come to think of it, I can probably afford it.

1989 Honda Accord

When my now 26-year-old daughter was nearing 16, she informed us she wanted a car – with all the usual, “I can help out, drive the kids,” etc. stuff – that she found the right one: a 1990 VW Jetta. We succumbed, bought it and it took her through high school, her sister through high school, and her brother halfway through his senior year. It met its demise at University and Alameda and thankfully left the boy and his friend intact. We donated it to public radio.

We hemmed and hawed about getting another car, a sort of punishment for his driving habits, but we came across a deal we couldn’t pass up: a genuine driven-by-only-one-little-old-lady 1989 Honda Accord with but 34,000 miles on it. Now almost three years into owning it, we couldn’t be more pleased.

I figured the Accord, now a real-life venerable model, was about 5 years old in 1989, but as it turns out I was way off. Honda introduced it in 1976 as a 3-door hatchback, with a little tiny 4-banger that featured a whopping 68 horsepower. Now in its 8th generation (as of the ’08 model, which features a V6 with 271 hp), our ’89 model was a 3rd generation Accord with a 2.0-liter four and 98 hp. It’s no speed demon, especially against the cars of today, but it has plenty of power for both the city and the highway, at least around town, and it drives beautifully.

What set the ’89 Accord apart from the competition – and there was growing competition in ’89 which saw the dawn of the Japanese luxury lines Lexus, Acura and Infiniti – was that the handsome Accord came with pop-up headlights that gave it a real sleek look during the day when they were folded into the hood.

Ours was also an upgraded model: sunroof, power windows, mirrors and door-locks (no keyless entry), stuff that at the time was really cutting edge. It is a four-door, with plenty of room for three in the second row, bucket seats up front, and a pretty big trunk for a car of this size. The funny thing is that when the Accord came out, and on into the ‘80s, ‘90s and beyond, it was the “larger sedan” in the Honda line, always bigger and more nicely appointed that the workhorse Civic. Well, today’s Civic makes the ’89 Accord look like a compact car, so you can tell how far we’ve come in 20 years. Other distinctions about the Accord: beginning in 1982 it was the first Japanese car to be manufactured in the United States, in Marysville, Ohio; and, from 1982 through 1997 it was the best-selling Japanese make in America.

You can see why it was a best-selling car for so many years. The Accord has always been, for its time, one of the nicest cars on the road in the regular car marketplace. Indeed, a friend of mine has a 2008, his second in a row, because first, it is a great vehicle, and second, they offered sweet lease deals on them. And it falls into my “venerable” category: while the 2009-09 model is a lot more car than my ’89, the design cues are still there, the heritage is still there, so we’re not talking about a revolution over and over again, a la the American car companies, but rather a deliberate evolution from year to year with the kind of classic starting point and incremental advances that keep a model popular for years on end.

I love our old Honda. No, it doesn’t have airbags and some of the other modern regulars, but it is a great, economical ride. It’s wonderful in the snow, reliable and, as I pointed out earlier, PAID FOR. With a little love, and a helpful mechanic it should go for years.

The Bluebook guides I checked for pricing only go back to 1990, suggesting that for an appraisal price you look up what dealers and people are willing to sell similar models for. I did that and for the LX, the trim we have, you can get a 1989 Honda Accord for between $2,500 and $4,000. That’s pretty good considering my newer Toyota minivan is worth something like less than half of that. It’s also pretty good in that three years ago I paid just $3,000 for the car.

The overall point is that in this day and age, there are plenty of good used models out there that can be had for a song and that will last quite a while. For my money, I suggest strongly Toyota and Honda, and the few other venerable models out there, most notably 3 Series BMWs, VW Jettas, and Jeep Cherokees. There’s a good reason so many of them are still on the road in relatively good shape.

And, of course, the beauty of a used car is that it is the best kind of car: paid for.