Wife's car was totaled. She gone. (The car. Not the wife. I like her.) We're in a rental through Friday. I want to buy a car and have the keys in my hand by Saturday. And yes, we need a car; public transit is not an option.
We were going to buy her brothers old car, a Solara (Camry), but we can't get it to pass emissions. The shop can't get it to pass since they can't get the monitors to reset to actually see what is wrong (it sat for 7 months since it failed emissions the last time), and the timing belt has not been replaced... ever? With 200k miles, it is a ticking time-bomb. So I'm not going to be throwing money into it, especially since the interior is... well, it isn't a pleasant smell. That car is still something that I'm going to try to fix, but I can't count on it and we need a car soon. So, that means that we *might* have a backup beater--probably about a 60% chance of it--but we can't count on it.
So we're looking at other options. We've narrowed it down to a few. What would MMM do? And don't say Corolla.
*Buy a niceish Acura, Lexus, or Infiniti for ~$6,000-$8,000 (may be financed because we can get 1.4%, but we have the cash for it) and keep it for 3-8 years as the wife's daily driver.
*Buy an older 4WD/AWD SUV (4Runner, QX4, RX300, Pathfinder, Highlander, or maybe a Tahoe) that will get us through September before we get something else (likely something like the above) and the SUV is relegated to beater with a heater status. We'd be spending between $1,500 and $4,000, cash.
*Buy a $1,000-$2,000 car, and run it until it dies for as cheaply as possible. This would be a Camry/ES300, Accord, Taurus, etc.
I'm leaning towards one of the last two options. I'd rather take a while longer to get the nice car that we're going to hang onto and the wife will drive for a few years. MMM thoughts?