Quote:
Originally Posted by TylerH860
By the time you tax, tag, insure and maintain 2 cars you might as well have one gas guzzler.
A well sorted old Mercedes diesel is going to cost you 1-2k a year to maintain properly if you don't do the work yourself. The old 123s will get at best 25MPG in mixed driving. 606 powered 124 and 210 30ish mixed.
By the time you do the math, its cheaper to keep the old Explorer.
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Agreed - a second car is always more expensive. Only buy a second car if you happen to have taken the first one to pieces (!) or you need additional vehicle redundancy.
If you want the feeling of paying less for fuel go the whole hog and change all the way to a diesel.
I personally would avoid any diesel with a dual mass flywheel.
For the more modern diesels you'll end up with weird diesel particulate filter (DPF) systems that need you to drive for a long way to get them to work properly. These systems capture the first puffs of soot that come out of a diesel on start up and then burn them off at high temperatures when the engine has been running for a long time. If you do lots of short trips then the DPF clogs and things start to get expensive to fix.