Thanks for all the responses everyone. Just a couple notes:
-I’m buying a new to me car because my left knee has decided that it can’t push the clutch in anymore...so auto is required.
-I need to be able to pull a small trailer. As a homeowner, landlord and de facto property manager, it’s excruciating to rent a truck every time I need to transport something large. I have a sweet landscaping trailer that works pretty well that I got for $500 though.
-I’m fairly handy and have owned/maintained several older BMWs.
So with all that in mind, I decided that a used truck is out. Not enough value, IMO. A totally stripped down, bench seat Tacoma with 100k miles and no cruise, power windows or locks is $12-14,000 here.
Most cars are not rated at all to tow, and I’m nervous about pulling a ~2500 lb trailer with a front wheel drive car, the tongue weight unweights the drive wheels. So I started looking at RWD and AWD small SUVs, and that brought me to Subaru.
The pre-2008 Forester is a really fun vehicle to drive. Unfortunately, Subaru’s have a tendency to blow their headgaskets, and buying one with recently repaired headgaskets is no help, since it’s apparently very easy to mess the job up. I thought about trying to buy one with headgaskets that were already blown, but people still wanted ~$4-5000 for a Forester with gallons of coolant and oil streaming out of the engine.
Other Japanese SUVs? RAV4s are apparently made of gold, and so are Highlanders and CR-Vs. These models also are among the least maintained vehicles I’ve ever seen, it’s shocking how bad the last CRV I looked at was.
So, in the end, I ended up with (another) old BMW. I found a 2005 X3. I’m the fourth owner, but the first owner leased, the second owner had it as a certified preowned car and maintained it at a dealer, and the third owner seemed to be a BMW enthusiast, since the maintenance records show actual fluid changes in the trans and transfer case. It drives great, and it was just over $5k. I might have to dump some money into changing bushing and shocks, but with the price differential between a used X3 and a used Tacoma, I can buy a lot of suspension bits.
Oh, and it’s got adaptive HID headlights that swing with the steering wheel. It’s like I’m in the future.
Here’s a pic, not that MMM people care about old BM-trouble-you’s