Originally Posted by Rob_E

It never takes more than a minute in the Living Car Free forum to remind me why I don't come into the Living Car Free forum. ;-)

I feel like I had the perfect Car-Lite car in my Ford Escort wagon. I only used the car in two situations: I needed to carry something too heavy to manage on the bike, or I wanted to travel further than the bike could go in the allotted time.

The wagon was smaller than a full-sized station wagon, but big enough to accommodate the occasional piece of furniture. And it got decent gas mileage, so traveling didn't seem so bad.

Unfortunately, I think there's a tipping point where Car-lite may not make sense. I killed the battery by letting it sit for months in the cold temps. It collected sap from trees it sat under without moving for months at a time. Ants moved in. I went to replace a dead tail light and found a wasps nest. Eventually the clutch went, and cost of repair seemed a little more than just using mass transit for my non-local travel. And actually needing to haul things locally seemed a rare enough situation that I couldn't even factor it in. I'm sure I could rent a pick up, if needed. I actually borrowed a pick up a couple of times in the last two years, because I let that Escort go and never replaced it.

Still, my wife really wants me to have a car, so sometimes I think on the idea of the ultimate car-lite car. I come back to the idea of something that could do a little hauling, but have good mileage for extended trips. I don't know what fits the bill these days. I keep threatening to get an El Camino, but I fear it wouldn't meet the gas mileage criteria. Given that I owned a car for several years and ended up letting it sit for weeks or months at a time, I wonder what the criteria is for having a car standing by, but still reliable. Should it be as new as possible to insure that the components still have a long life? Should it be older, because it will be a simpler design with less to go wrong?

Ultimately, it probably doesn't make sense for me, given how little I tended to drive when I did have a car, but I still wonder about it.