[Steve Carlton]

What dealers are within your range? How many years and miles to hope to get out of the car? Would you consider an EV?

Probably around 2018 when I was a sales manager at a Volvo dealer, we had a Nissan Murano AWD with 50k miles on it. The transmission and AWD unit were bad. That's when my hatred of Nissan developed. I had tremendous affection for Datsun, though. Anything you get can be covered with an extended service contract (warranty), up to 10 years/150,000 miles these days. Personally, I don't like being outside of warranty and I don't want to worry about coming up with many thousands of dollars all of a sudden. An extended service contract can level the playing field, allowing you to get most any brand you want, with hassle and resale value being the negative against some serious positives.

I consider Nissan and Mitsubishi to be the bottom rungs of the Japanese cars, reliability-wise. I put Toyota/Lexus and Honda/Acura at the top, along with Subaru's recent arrival. And Mazda in the middle. Not sure where to place Hyundai and Kia. I've heard a lot of horror stories. Just my feelings, not well-founded in data.