rev up your engines, today I'm going to help you answer the question, is it time to
buy another car, now over the years customers and fans would email me and
say, Scotty I need to decide, should I get rid of my car get another one, am I
going to put too much money into it, is it worth keeping or should I just get rid
of it, now me I've always told people the truth at least the truth is I see it, and
I've lost customers that way, because sometimes I'd say, hey that car of yours
it's a junky car you're going to have problems with it, they might have loved
the car they got mad at me and never came back, but hey I was telling the truth
especially if they own something like a Jaguar, that was just ready to fall apart and
bankrupt them, so today I'm going to give you some tips to show you when it's
probably a good idea to get rid of your car and get another one, instead of
spending a fortune fixing it and the first tip has to do with your engine, if
you have a car with an engine that burns a lot of oil, or smokes quite a bit, it's
often a good idea to say goodbye to the car, because these days modern engines
have variable valve timing, they're much fancier than you used to be, in order to
rebuild them correctly it requires an extremely large amount of money and even
then, a lot of guys don't do a very good job rebuilding them, so if you've taken
care of your car, change your own filter regularly, but eventually the engine just
starts to flat wear out, hey that's generally the time to say
goodbye to the car and find another, because really, in my history if I had a
car that was just flat worn out, I found it was cheaper to buy a good used car
that had a good engine in it, then it would be to repair or replace the old
engine in the car that was worn out, now it gets really hot here in Houston in
the summer of course, and I had a customer once with 280zx Nissan and the
air-conditioning stopped working and I showed him that it was going to cost him
over 2,500 bucks to repair the air-conditioning, so I said, why don't you
just get another used Nissan instead, so he went out bought a used 280zx
that had 60,000 miles less than the one he already had and the air-conditioning
and it was working fine, and guess what he paid less for that car
than he would have paid me to fix the air conditioning in the original one, now you
don't want to just go by mileage to decide when to get rid of a car, because my
old Celica here, hey it's got two hundred and thirty-nine thousand miles on it but
still runs like a clock, but if you've got a car with high mileage and the
transmission shifts bad, the engine shakes, the front suspension is worn and it kind of
wobbles when you drive it around, sure it's probably time to say goodbye to that
car and get another one because hey you add up all the prices of what it would cost
to fix everything, it's probably three four or five times the value of the car
itself, but if you check all the tires on your car and they're wearing evenly and
it still rides good when you're going down the road without excessive bumps
then you just might decide to keep the car, heck modern cars they're all
computerized, they have an overuse of plastic parts, there's no way that any
modern car is going to last twenty, thirty years, like this old Celica, but
now I'm coming to the subject of rust, as Neil Young sang, rust never sleeps
if you live some place where it rusts a lot, especially the Rust Belt, once steel
starts rusting, it rust from the inside out, it's all over
everything's just self-destructing, I remember when I was a kid growing up in
Niagara Falls, we had a fifty-two Ford Fairlane, it was
so rusty that water got into the floorboards and in the backseat in the
winter it would freeze, and we would pretend we were ice skate in the back seat
of the car playing hockey games, now that car was in it's death row
rust was everywhere, one time we went to my uncle's farm and the brakes rusted
out, my grandfather had to come 50 miles and
he drove her back to the garage with no brakes at all, just the standard
transmission where you gear down and he made it and then fixed it, but you don't want
to go that far, once they start to rust don't think, oh I can fix it up the only
thing you do is cut the rust off and if the whole frame and everything is
rusting, then it's just time to say goodbye and get another car, now as a rule
of thumb, when you're thinking about where they should keep a car or not
always look at what the cost of repairs are going to be versus the value of the
car, never put more money into the car then the car is worth, unless it's a
sentimental thing for you and then really you're not being logical then, as an
example this beat-up car with dents and rust and pieces falling off of it, it
needs over two thousand dollars of power steering work done to it, so the customer
he's just going to drive it around without power steering and when he gets sick of that he's
just going to junk the car, just realize sometimes, hey it's a better idea to just
say goodbye and start over again, now the last tip has to do with car wrecks if
you have the misfortune of getting in a rather large car wreck
take my advice, take the insurance buyout rather than fix a giant wreck, because
once they're in a giant wreck, I've had more customers say, I wish I would
have never had that car fixed, it's been nothing but problems since I got it back
take the buyout and get another car if you're in a big wreck, but sometimes like
this matrix, sure it's 11 years old but it's got plenty of life in it, now you
know how to tell the difference, so if you never want to miss another one of my
new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!