Ask HN: What car do you drive?

2009 Saab 9-3 BioPower (etanol). Why do you ask? :-)

Right now the answer is "I don't" since both of my cars are b0rked. But I own a Ford Expedition that I originally bought mainly so I could put a bike rack on it and haul my mountain bike, cooler, toolbox, etc. around for mountain biking. My other car is a Mazda RX-8, but when it needed work, I parked it and started driving the Expedition full-time until I blew the engine in it. When that happened, I decided to just go car-less for a while, and walk/bike/Uber/Lyft/bus everywhere for a while. "A while" has turned into over a year now.

All of that said, I plan to order a pre-rebuilt long-block engine and have swapped into the truck, since not having it to haul my bike around is annoying. I'll probably fix the RX-8 at some point as well, but there's no real timetable on it.

2008 BMW X5

2005 legacy. I wanted the AWD for going to the snow, and I got it really cheap because the check engine light was on and it had error codes that looked scary but I knew i could fix. Working on a car is therapeutic after coding I find. Does everything I want, and is essentially not worth insuring. When i was younger and stupider I bought nice cars, if i'm honest it was probably so people knew how much money I made. The thing about expensive cars though, is once you're in it, it doesn't really matter how much it cost. They all do the same thing. And how often do any of us rev our engine above 4k RPM? So how powerful it is doesn't matter either. Installed a DVD head unit in the legacy so I could use Bluetooth music from my phone on long drives, and a reversing camera because I don't want to reverse over somebodies child.

It's funny because my wife hates it compared to the new cars we used to own, not because they were expensive, just because they never needed me to fix them, I think she finds the idea of having to pull stuff apart to ensure they keep running a bit scary. I love it compared to the new cars though, I like how much work I have done to it, everything from replacing O2 sensors to re soldering circuit boards. I think if you work in software, you need a hands on hobby to stop yourself going insane.