You feel your body breaking down and want to buy some joy before you're too old to enjoy it?
My advice as someone who's been there and done that: don't buy the car.
I meant to take advantage of post-financial crash automaker desperation by purchasing a once-in-a-lifetime new car on the cheap. I did it. I bought a 35k-ish car that looked like 40k and felt like 40k and cost me 29k. The same money left in the markets would be 55k now, but that's not what you're concerned about. Here's what counts:
It didn't make a lot happier. It only made me a little happier, and that wasn't worth it.
I did get some admiring glances every so often. At three glances a month for three years, then two a month, then one, now none, I got probably 200+ admiring glances at a cost of $250 each. I noticed maybe half of them, so $500 per ego stroke. At 30 seconds per glow, maybe $1000 per minute ($60,000 per hour). Not efficient, not sustaining. Plus it got old after a bit. And then, after a few years passed, other people didn't respect my car as much as I did, so even that was gone.
That's not the hard part. The hard part is that the aches and pains happened anyway. Some exercise and physical therapy helped, but I'm still an ex-marathoner, not a marathoner. My hair turned gray. I dye my beard. I tell myself there's a bit of salt in the pepper after a week. My honest friend just tells me my beard is gray. Car or no, the 20something babes don't flip their hair at me any more, only the 45 to 55 year olds do. My parent and my best friend and my other best friend died. I grieved and cleaned up some of their junk and learned to be happy that I knew them. I realized that all my life, old people had learned that these things were coming and left me in peace to learn on my own sweet time because like all young people, hearing about age just turned me off and made me scorn them.
The car solved none of this, stopped none of this, was irrelevant. The brief joy was too little. I would have been better off renting a Lambo for $2000 one weekend, spending $1000 on race track lessons and a rented stock car, and putting a bike rack on top of a cheap sedan to look outdoorsy if I wanted a second glance from someone. I would have been better off joining a bike club or a hike club, not a car club, or joining a cooking club for that matter to increase the company in my life.
Yes, there's a place for joy if your time is short. But a new car if you're not even at FI isn't the place.
I get the feeling of anticipation that you're confident, basically, that you have enough. I get that now you're approaching enough, now that you feel it emotionally, you're saying "Can I spend for happiness now?" I get that as the cold wind blows, you shiver and say "What about me? What about now? What can I have?"
You can have anything you want, but a new car isn't a good way to get much of it. In and of itself, it's a pretty inefficient purchase. In fact, it's pretty much guaranteed to distract you from the important things that you can and should and must and will find right on the other side of the questions that you're asking. You will find friends and joy and wisdom and peace, you will savor the years that remain, be they five or fifty.
But you will not find these things efficiently in a car club.
Ok, you might. You're you. But I didn't. And most people won't. Blessings and best wishes regardless.