My dad’s relationship to cars is way different than mine. He has a nice Lexus LS460 and my mom drives a practical Volvo S80. They drive their cars separately every day to and from the same office.

So he wonders why we still have a solitary 1995 Geo Prizm that has a few cosmetic defects. For us it’s a great car with nearly 200,000 miles and no major issues.

Some years ago, I started biking to work exclusively. Katie decided to stop the auto insurance on her car and we shared the Prizm. Before we moved to California we donated her car since it hadn’t been driven for years.

California’s nice weather, and walkable/bikable neighborhoods allowed us to even further distance us from our car. Even for our morning commute, it’s a lot easier to take a shuttle to work, or if we’re up for it bike the 8 or 9 miles.

As far as life in Mountain View goes, the only time we drive is to Costco for our major grocery purchases, but everything else is walkable or bikable. Our car pretty much exists for weekends and large shopping trips.

I of course expected this, but the concept of biking and walking places and public transportation are foreign to my parents who live in “Suburbia”, MN. Surely a young couple like Katie and I should have a nice car, with electric adjustable seats, and a moon roof. Possibly a Toyota Camry or a Lexus ES.

The thing with living in the Bay Area is most people drive nice cars. So the novelty of having a nicer car just can’t happen. You look around and BMW, Mercedes, Lexus and Audi are as common as Honda and Toyota. Sure I envy nice cars every now and then, but I don’t feel like entering an expensive pissing contest that I’d never win.

The other thing about living in the Bay Area, is its perfectly acceptable to just have a decent inexpensive car. Like I said, Toyota’s and Hondas are commonplace. Sure, ours is a bit rusty and has some additional cosmetic damage, but for a car we use about one day a week it serves its purpose.

There are times when a nicer car would be… well nice. We started renting cars when we have to do a lot of driving. It makes road trips much better and keeps us from catching “lets-get-a-new-car-itis,” This weekend I had my in-laws in town and we decided to rent a nice car. I spent less than $140 for a 3 day rental of a premium level car. Granted it was a Buick, but it was a nice Buick with leather seats, dual climate and it was new and clean.

Renting a car could get expensive, but even simple math shows that it’s a steal. Let’s say we decided to move up from a 1995 Prizm to a 2003 Lexus IS300. Still an old car, but a nicer old car than we have. That would easily set us back $13,000. That’s over 90 3-day car rentals. Not to mention that this car wouldn’t hold 5 people much more comfortably than our existing car. We’d still end up renting.

This puts us in a nice position. We really only need to budget for a new car in an emergency. However, the chance of an emergency is low barring a major accident (knock-on-wood). The Prizm/Corolla line is very reliable and very repairable. Renting a luxury car beats owning a luxury car for us.