That&#;s right, I have a family of five and I don&#;t own an SUV. This family of five includes two adults, one teenage boy the size of an adult, a soon-to-be eleven year old, and a three year old in a carseat.
If you want to learn more, please visit our website.
Apparently car companies are counting on younger families buying ever-larger SUV&#;s. Why? Because &#;When families shift into the large SUVs, they can pay from $50,000 to $90,000 with extras.&#; according to this USA Today article. They are apparently even designing vehicles, like Ford&#;s new Expedition SUV, with space for extra large purses!
My fellow ladies &#; this is what you really want, right? At least Ford thinks so. Be sure to let them know how thoughtful they are!
What I love is that the USA Today article linked above considers 37 year olds millennial. We&#;ve seen this definition before in their famous article about how one in six millennials have$100k saved. So, according to this, I&#;m a millennial, which means this SUV strategy is targeted right at me. Hooray!
Sometimes, living in my own bubble, I forget how unusual our choices can seem to other people. I&#;ve seen this before when writing about why my kids don&#;t have cell phones, or all about kids birthday parties at home.
So yes, it&#;s true. I have three kids (one adult sized, one in a carseat), a largeish dog, and a cat. We go camping for a week once a year, and haul all our gear for the trip in our vehicles. We drive two cars &#; a Honda Accord and a Ford Focus hatchback &#; and make it just fine. How do we do it &#; and why? Let&#;s discuss.
Where I live, almost every family seems to own an SUV. I know this isn&#;t the case everywhere in the US, or around the world, so perhaps it&#;s not common where you live. If so, not owning an SUV or minivan wouldn&#;t seem like a big deal. If that&#;s the case for you, I&#;d love you to leave a comment on what&#;s common in your region or country!
Also, I don&#;t want to play a game of frugal one-upmanship. Long time readers know that I&#;m big on supporting others no matter what their circumstances. Personal finance is personal &#; meaning you have to do what works for you. If you own an SUV or minivan, I&#;m not passing judgement on you. Also, maybe you have a family of ten and all ride bikes everywhere, not owning a car at all. I think that&#;s awesome.
My families decisions are ours alone. They may not be yours.
As long as you&#;ve made a careful decision based not on what everyone around you does, but on your own goals, dreams, and priorities, then you&#;re good.
When you want what other people don&#;t have, you need to do things other people won&#;t do ~ CMO
Neither my husband nor I want an SUV or minivan. Why not?
There are a number of reasons.
I&#;m going to go through all the different aspects of my decision &#; both to share with you (because it&#;s fun!), and to hopefully help you think through your own decision process. If you know someone struggling with a car decision, be sure to share to lend them a hand.
So without further ado, here are all the different aspects we&#;ve considered when making this decision.
I first got my license back in , and my husband in (or so). We remember pretty low gas prices from our childhood, and from when we were first licensed. In , gas was $1.06 per gallon. In ? $1.13.
Side note &#; typing this makes me feel old. &#;Back in my day, I could get a movie ticket for a quarter and a candy bar for a nickel&#;&#;
When we were growing up, pretty much everyone drove a car. Some folks drove trucks &#; my father had a truck for his painting side hustle. Large families like my husbands (four kids) drove vans.
Both my husband and I remember the first rush to SUV&#;s back in the early &#;s. At first they were no where, and by the mid-&#;s they were absolutely everywhere. When parking at the grocery store, it sometimes felt like we were the only ones in a car. Back then, we just had one little child in a carseat, so a car had plenty of room for our small family. Even after our middle son was born in , since both boys were small, we were good.
Before they could get much larger, we went through the gas price increase of the Great Recession, where gas spiked above $4 per gallon. That price increase was a painful addition to the budget for us, and I can&#;t imagine how much worse it was for owners of large vehicles.
Interestingly, after that we saw a very marked decrease in the number of SUV&#;s on the road. Our observations were confirmed by news reports that people were fleeing SUV&#;s and trucks. Cars had come back in fashion, and this would continue for the better part of the last decade.
But, as always, people don&#;t learn the lessons of the past. Gas prices went down, and stayed down for a long time. Eventually the financial crisis was over, and more SUV&#;s crept onto the road.
We didn&#;t forget, though. Gas prices were $4 per gallon once, and they&#;ll reach that price again. History shows that gas prices fluctuate a lot. I like the flexibility of not needing a large amount of gas to drive my vehicles around. In fact, I&#;d love to get an electric or hybrid car once the cost makes sense.
This sounds obvious, but I believe most people don&#;t give enough thought to the costs after they purchase. Not only are SUV&#;s more expensive to buy (more on that in a minute), but they&#;re also more expensive to maintain.
Luckily AAA has done some research on this, and their findings aren&#;t that surprising. Check out the real cost of owning different types of vehicles, assuming you drive 15k miles per year (for other mileages, go to their report and find the details):
The smaller the vehicle, the less expensive it is to repair. Interestingly, the small SUV is less expensive to repair than a medium sedan. My Honda Accord is a mid-sized sedan, although my husbands Focus would be considered a &#;small sedan&#;. I think. I&#;m not a car person.
I always highly encourage people to check the source of quoted facts, and be an educated consumer. When you read the report, you&#;ll see that the cost above includes not just maintenance and insurance. It also includes gas (already covered above), depreciation, and financing.
Yes, car loans are so standard that they assume you&#;ve taken out a 5 year loan to buy this car.
I want to note that costs also vary a lot based on two other factors not addressed in the report:
The brand of car
. Some brands are much more expensive to maintain than others. Some types of cars depreciate faster, while others maintain their value. You can check out this article for more on cost by brand.I didn&#;t see the reports mentioning taxes, but I did want to make a (likely obvious) point about taxes. Where I live, car taxes are pretty high. Just like owning a more expensive house means more expensive taxes &#; forever &#; owning a more expensive vehicle does the same thing.
Luckily, the taxes go down over time as your vehicles get older.
The smaller, and older, the vehicle is, the less it will cost.
See, I promised I would talk about it later, and now it&#;s later. Hooray!
Also, I know this is super obvious. But it&#;s still something I want to mention.
Original purchase price shouldn&#;t be your only consideration when picking a vehicle. Maintenance, insurance, taxes, etc. can add up over the years to multiples of the original price of the car. It&#;s still a large consideration, especially if you have to finance the purchase.
Small SUV&#;s seem to cost about the same as mid-size sedan. Small compact cars have the lowest price. Hybrids and electric cars are more expensive at smaller sizes, of course, but generally this rule holds true.
This is a tip I picked up a long time ago from The Tightwad Gazette, one of the OG books on frugality that I still re-read from time to time.
I&#;ve known people with two kids who &#;need&#; large SUV&#;s, and then proceed to mostly use the SUV to drive back and forth to work. Alone. For over an hour a day. Probably not the best use of a vehicle of that size.
Are there times I wish we had a larger vehicle? Sure! When we go camping once a year, we actually fill up both cars with equipment and people. It would be nice to just head out in one vehicle. When we head out on our road trips, the car can get a bit cramped.
But deciding on a vehicle size based on one or two weeks per year, rather than our needs 50 weeks of the year, isn&#;t ideal. My car is mostly driven back and forth to work &#; by myself &#; so I get my car with that in mind. My husbands car is mostly used to drive the kids around, with their backpacks. So we don&#;t want to buy a huge car for two weeks per year.
If we ran out of room in our cars, I would rather buy a trailer for the extra stuff. Or we might rent a larger vehicle. Renting a large vehicle for a week or two would still be more cost effective for us than buying an SUV or minivan.
It&#;s really not hard to manage five people in cars.
Most weekdays, we&#;re driving around separately, so it&#;s not an issue at all. I drive back and forth to work (1.5 hours per day), and my husband drives the boys around. The oldest, 14 and adult sized, will drive in the front seat with my husband while the two younger boys are in the back.
If you want to learn more, please visit our website habibi.
And then, on the weekends, we&#;ll usually take my car (the Accord) because it has more room in the backseat. Sometimes we will drive the Focus with all five of us together, but it&#;s less comfortable for the teenager. He still fits, but it&#;s a bit cramped.
As I mentioned above, when we go camping we&#;ll take both cars with us.
If we need to transport something large, my cars backseats will fold down. If it&#;s something very large, we&#;ll have it delivered or we might rent a truck.
What about the dog? All five of us plus a dog can actually fit in the Focus, since it&#;s a hatchback. We don&#;t often need to do that, though. Thor doesn&#;t like to go camping with us, so he usually hangs out with Grandma and Grandpa while we&#;re gone. My husband will typically drop him off with the boys while I&#;m at work.
What about friends? If a friend needs a ride, there&#;s room for them. If we need to transport more friends, then we need to split up the kids (two cars, again) and remove the carseat from one of the cars. We&#;ve done that before when our oldest son had a birthday party where we drove everyone to see a movie. He had five friends over, and everyone made it just fine.
The Accord has a pretty large trunk, and since the Focus is a hatchback, it&#;s pretty easy to pack a large amount of stuff. We can easily fit luggage for all of us for a week into the trunk of my car.
We don&#;t have a frequent need to give other people rides, but if we did, we would use the same strategies.
From some of the reactions I get, you would think this is some sort of huge sacrifice. It&#;s really not. Sometimes it&#;s mildly inconvenient, but 99% of the time it works just fine. And that other 1% of the time, it just takes a bit of work and creativity to get things to work out.
What kind of car arrangement do you have &#; and more importantly, what was your decision process? And if you have an &#;untraditional&#; or unusual arrangement compared with the people you know, what kinds of reactions have you gotten?
Let me know in the comments. You&#;ll be part of helping others make the best of these kinds of decisions for themselves.
Be sure to follow my blog for more great posts via or WordPress, or connect with me on Facebook or Twitter and say hello! You can also check out what I&#;m buying or baking on Instagram, what I&#;m pinning on Pinterest, or the latest books I&#;m reading (or want to read) over on Goodreads.
A lot of people in my Twitter feed seem really excited about the idea of owning a car that can drive itself anywhere, anytime. My fellow Tesla drivers call this Full Self-Driving. I call this funny, because I&#;ve spent pretty much my whole adult life trying to drive anywhere, anytime I feel like it, and I still haven&#;t quite figured out how to do it.
Certainly not in one car, and definitely not safely.
I&#;ve driven all over the world, in big cars, small cars, new cars, old cars, race cars, rally cars, and trucks. I almost drowned fording a Canadian river in a Land Rover, sank a dune buggy into the surf in Thailand, and drove nonstop from New York to LA through a snowstorm in a wooden-framed Morgan 3-wheeler.
The #1 lesson I&#;ve learned from all of this gonzo driving is that smart people can make some very dumb decisions behind the wheel. Human nature is the art of doing things science says one shouldn&#;t. It may start with driving games and some harmless off-roading in New Mexico, but it ends with hurtling 150 mph through the driving rain to set a Cannonball Run record, or strapped into a rented 4×4 tumbling down an Icelandic volcano.
This was all boatloads of fun, but it showed a profound lack of common sense.
The technical term for a vehicle that can drive itself anywhere, anytime is Level 5, or just L5. But the colloquial term for humans who drive like this is &#;fool.&#; The best human drivers who ever lived aren&#;t L5, because they know &#; whether it&#;s experience, instinct, a sixth sense, or just the ability to read a map &#; that there are times and places you just shouldn&#;t drive.
Why? Because risk can only be reasonably measured up to a point. Once you layer in unpredictable conditions like severe weather, or go off-road, you&#;re no longer playing chess, you&#;re playing roulette. Have you ever driven through a tornado? I did. Once. What&#;s &#;safe&#; varies driver-to-driver. Some people can safely drive places others can&#;t. The same human driver might be safe one day, and dangerous the next. We get tired. Our eyes can deceive us. There are things we can&#;t see. There are things we can&#;t react to.
And yet some of us choose to drive in places we shouldn&#;t, in conditions we can&#;t handle. I know because I used to be one of them.
One key benefit of developing artificial intelligence is to help us avoid the consequences of the suboptimal choices some of us make every day. That means teaching an AI-driven car to know where it can drive us safely &#; and where it can&#;t. That&#;s what I call common sense, and not everyone has it. Ask any group of drivers to look at the same road, or trail, or rocks. Some of them will say NO WAY&#;
But there will always be that person who says WATCH THIS.
If I&#;m going to send an autonomous vehicle to pick up my daughter from school, I don&#;t want it to say WATCH THIS. Before I let my daughter nap in the back of one of these things, I need to know that it knows when to say NO WAY. I want to know that it will stick to roads where it can and will drive more safely than I will. And not just me, but also people like the ride-hail driver who kept stabbing the brakes last week and made me spill coffee on my white linen pants.
Avoiding the mistakes we often make means setting boundaries. A lot of people don&#;t like to hear about boundaries. I&#;m one of them, but I also know that some boundaries are good, like the ones I give my 2-year-old. The hard boundaries we give kids eventually become the soft boundaries adults call common sense.
The Best Technology Mirrors Our Common Sense
What do you call self-driving technology that mirrors our common sense? I consider it what SAE calls Level 4, or just L4. An L4-capable vehicle can drive itself within certain boundaries and conditions. That could just be a suburb in good weather, or a city in the rain, or many cities&#;and the highways connecting them. As L4 technology learns, L4 vehicles can drive more places, in harder conditions. A lot like people. Eventually L4 vehicles will work most of the places most of us are likely to need a ride, or a package delivered.
Think of what cell coverage maps looked like in versus today.
Cell phones and cars that can drive themselves are technically very different, but they&#;re exactly the same in the way we use them. They don&#;t need to work everywhere, anytime &#; although we&#;d like them to. They just need to reliably work everywhere most of us go. If we go somewhere service is unreliable, we plan ahead with an alternative, like a satellite . It took years for cellphones to get there. But they did.
But the funny thing about the people excited about L5 cars is the idea that nothing short of anywhere, anytime is worth doing. If we applied that logic to cell phones, we still wouldn&#;t have them. Just because my iPhone doesn&#;t get a signal in parts of Yellowstone National Park, why shouldn&#;t I be able to use one in Dallas or Miami?
Oh wait, I can. Where there is demand, supply follows. A lot of people live in cities. Yellowstone? Not so much, which is why only half the park has decent connectivity.
The Problem With L5 Vehicles
Which brings us to the other funny thing about the idea of L5 capability. Even if you could teach a car to drive itself safely anywhere, anytime, being smart is not enough. Vehicles aren&#;t just software, they&#;re hardware too. That was the #2 lesson of my adventures: the world is very big and diverse, and so are the vehicles we had to build to reach its farthest corners.
Like sporks and houseboats, the more things a thing is asked to do, the worse it is at everything. Why do race cars look different than trucks? Because they&#;re each designed to do different things really, really well. They all have wheels, but a race car isn&#;t going to get far off-road, and a truck isn&#;t going to be the best on a track, or even getting around lower Manhattan.
If you want one vehicle to reliably go anywhere, anytime, choices must be made. Sporks mean compromises. If you had to pick one vehicle with sufficient compromises to make it as close to L5 as possible, it would resemble a spork-on-wheels, which is what we have right here:
These nearly L5 vehicles have obvious drawbacks. How would you park one downtown? I don&#;t have garage space for this in my building. The bigger the spork, the harder it is to eat. Visibility, speed, ride quality, fuel economy and comfort are all amazing&#;but not good. What if I have to change a tire, or tread? Owning one seems like a big and unnecessary hassle.
I want more convenience in my life, not less.
What kind of person wants to drive everywhere in all conditions anyway? No one except idiots like me, who do it for fun. I get that there are people who might absolutely need to, like first responders, or the military, or people in the movies who need to get somewhere to do something before a clock runs out and something bad happens. Like that time Paul Walker had to save the dogs at the South Pole, or the end of every Mission Impossible.
That&#;s a lot of something somethings, but most of us don&#;t live like that.
If perfect is the enemy of good, then why try to solve a problem that for 99% of us doesn&#;t exist? If L5 makes no sense, L4 makes perfect sense, because a car that knows where it can safely go is just common sense. That&#;s the point of L4: common sense. Someday L4 vehicles will blanket the world we need them to, the same way cellphones do.
And for those who absolutely want to drive where AI can&#;t go, there will always be steering wheels.
(Reprinted with permission - original post @ www.groundtruthautonomy.com)
The company is the world’s best Kids Off Road Car supplier. We are your one-stop shop for all needs. Our staff are highly-specialized and will help you find the product you need.