Car crisis, Part 2: A choice to make

I just got off the phone with the person at the frame repair shop. He offered a somewhat more optimistic assessment of the damage than the guy at my regular garage, saying he didn’t see a reason why the car wouldn’t be safe to drive to Shore Leave after his repairs, which he estimates to cost about $1100. That’s not counting the cost of the fuel leak and other repairs my garage would then have to do. It’s not an insanely bad price, but that’s kind of the problem — it’s exactly in the range that makes it hard to decide, because it’s not cheap enough to be easily affordable and not pricey enough to be obviously not worth it.

He also said that he would be willing to buy the car from me so he could repair and resell it, though he didn’t specify how much he might offer. I doubt it would be worth very much in its condition.

So I have a difficult decision. On the one hand, I have wanted to get a newer, better car, and this is a chance to do that. On the other hand, it would be awkward to be left without a car when I haven’t had time to prepare for that situation, especially with Shore Leave just three weeks away. It might be worth paying for the repairs just for the convenience of still having a car in the near term, and for the sake of being able to take my time shopping for a new car rather than being forced into a hasty decision. If I have more time to look, maybe I can even find a better deal and thereby balance out the cost of the repairs. It would also give me more time to refocus on my novel in progress instead of having to delay it further.

But there’s another consideration that came to me overnight. Is it really worth buying a car at all? Could I get by without one, like I did in the years before my father’s deteriorating health required me to take over driving for him? Aside from Shore Leave, I really don’t use the car much, mostly just for trips to the grocery store and the library, which are within walking distance (well, borderline for the library, until my local branch completes its renovations). The main reason I prefer having a car is because of the COVID risk of taking the bus or an Uber, or of grocery shopping in-store instead of using curbside pickup.

And though I currently have enough money to buy a car thanks to my inheritance, I don’t yet know what kind of writing contracts I may get this year, if any. If the current slowdown doesn’t improve soon, I may have to live off my inherited savings for a while longer until I can find other work. So this is a bad time to make a major purchase like a car. Glancing around, it looks like I could get a used car for as low as a few thousand dollars, but I figure anything sufficiently newer and better than my current car might cost as much as I typically spend in a year or more. I’m not sure my need for a new car is great enough to justify that big a reduction of my safety net — at least not until I’ve lined up new contract work.

So I’d been thinking that maybe I could get by without a car, just renting one for Shore Leave. But now that I’m told my repaired car may be more viable than I was led to believe, and that the cost of repairs wouldn’t be too exorbitant, it seems like it might be a good idea to keep it around for the limited use I generally have for it. It might cost me more in the long term if and when I replace the car, but I’m no longer certain it’s a good idea to buy a new car. In the near term, it seems like repairing it is the easiest and most practical route to take, for a number of reasons.

The frame guy told me there’s no rush, so I have time to think it through. As before, I welcome opinions and suggestions.