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What's the worst financial decision you've ever made?
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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I have never bought a vehicle for more than $5k, and most were 25+ years old when purchased. Most lasted 10+ years with virtually no significant repairs beyond the post-purchase glow-up.
Downside is that I have been hankering to get into an electric for some time now, but I am running into a few blockers:
Eh, I removed the SIM chip from my 2015 Nissan Leaf. Took about 15 minutes with a screwdriver and YouTube.
I’ll never buy an EV due to all of the reasons you listed. I’d say our next vehicle will be a 90s Toyo/Nissan/Honda sedan. I’ll gladly drive my current Subaru until it dies though. Hoping for 10+ years out of it.
For me, the issue with my older vehicles is the cost of fuel. The math is clear - an EV is radically cheaper over the long haul, especially for something like a sedan. Plus, far fewer moving parts to break.
I think, however, that a conversion of an older car is the trick. Sure, modern EVs are a shitton heavier, but only if you want it to go 700-1,200km. I don’t. I would only need a 100-200km range because bombing around town will be it’s only duty. Which means far fewer batteries and a powertrain weight that likely matches the original engine and drivetrain, allowing me to retain the original suspension as-is.
Cheaper for now. Don’t think for a second that costs will remain low when the majority of drivers switch. The population is used to budgeting x amount of money for fuel monthly, don’t think for a second that the cooperate owners will allow those savings to become the norm.
EV is cheaper now but it’ll likely get enshitified like everything else in this country. They will just use the excuse that more people using the grid = higher cost per kWh. When we all know that the data centers are using far more energy than single family homes charging a Chevy Bolt.
The fact that any homeowner can take their house entirely off-grid without consequences, and use their vehicle as a partial whole-house battery, takes many of those concerns off of the table.
Combine that with many companies offering EV conversions to vehicles that are old enough (minimal electronics), and you can easily bypass any enshitticiation with solar panels and an EV conversion that costs much less than a new EV.
Slate Truck. Extremely stripped-down. No cell radio. No GPS radio. No WiFi or Bluetooth, unless you stick some kind of hardware that can do them in there. Hell, no touchscreen car computer, just a place you can mount a tablet if you want. Doesn't even have automatic windows as a base option. Aside from having airbags, air conditioner, and being an EV, basically a 1980s-style vehicle.
It'll fail some of your other requirements, because it's new and you'd need a used vehicle to hit a $5k price point. Just pointing out that it'll meet the privacy point.
I do agree that it is depressingly rare to find modern cars that don't have privacy issues. It's not that I expected all of them to be privacy friendly, but I expected there to be more options.
Slate is also funding Fascism, being a Bezos project.
But it hits most other requirements, true.
Downside is that I want and need a traditional sedan with a full-sized trunk capable of securely holding at least 3-6 adult bodies, not a truck. If I was to get a truck, I also need it to haul 5,000kg on the regular across steep/alpine roads, 8,000kg+ in a pinch over mostly flat and level roads. The Slate truck is utterly incapable of that. And I have two F-150 7700 units that can and have done exactly that.
Yeah my current mechanic strongly advises I keep my 15y/o car as long as I can and basically never even consider an EV as they currently exist.
Your mechanic likely isn’t learning how to work on EVs and has a monetary interest in you not buying an EV that requires next to no maintenance.
Many EVs have DRM out the wazoo, requiring the mechanic to spend $1,000,000 on a piece of software that has a $6,000/mo subscription just to authorize a brake replacement with the mothership. Otherwise the vehicle refuses to even roll, much less move under its own power.
And then the mechanic needs to rinse-and-repeat this spending spree with every other manufacturer who is also making EVs.
That shit becomes prohibitively expensive shockingly fast. And manufacturers are going whole-hog on this technique to send people back to dealer garages (who don’t have to pay those fees) for a slice of those profits, instead of independent shops that provide no profits whatsoever. They’re literally enshittifying cars until the only people capable of fixing them are dealers, or those independent shops who got wealthy enough fast enough to pay for that software.