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If your spouse wants to buy your teenager a brand-new car for safety, the instinct is easy to understand. New cars arrive with glossy brochures, fresh warranties, and a reassuring promise that newer must mean safer. The real answer, though, is more nuanced, and it depends on what changed in the last five years and which car you are comparing.

If your car spends most of its life on five-minute errands, your mechanic may be giving you a very real warning. Short trips can be hard on an engine because the oil, coolant, exhaust, and battery may never reach the temperatures they need to work at their best. That does not mean occasional short drives will ruin a healthy car overnight, but a steady diet of cold starts and quick shutdowns can absolutely speed up wear.

You’ve changed your own winter tires for years without thinking much about it. Then your insurance company says that doing the job yourself could leave you without coverage. Since when does saving a trip to the mechanic come with a warning like that?

On a freezing morning, starting the car and letting it sit for several minutes can feel like basic mechanical sympathy. Many drivers learned the habit from parents who insisted a cold engine needed time before going anywhere. That advice once made more sense than it does for most modern vehicles. Today, the better routine is usually much shorter.

Car brands can disappear surprisingly quickly. A merger, shrinking sales, corporate restructuring, or one badly timed recession can erase a badge that drivers grew up seeing everywhere. Yet plenty of discontinued marques remain highly visible at car shows, auctions, enthusiast gatherings, and in garages where owners refuse to let them fade away. These 24 departed names left behind cars distinctive enough to keep people talking long after the dealerships closed.

Your car behaved beautifully while it was under warranty, and now it seems to want something repaired every few months. That timing can feel suspicious, but an expired warranty does not suddenly make mechanical parts fail. What often happens is simpler: several components have accumulated roughly the same years, miles, heat cycles, vibrations, and road exposure. Once the car reaches that stage, separate maintenance and repair needs can begin arriving close together.

Saab built some of the strangest, smartest cars ever sold, from the 900 Turbo to the Viggen. Here are the unforgettable Saabs enthusiasts would love to bring back.

Everybody remembers the Ford F-100 and Chevrolet C10. But the 1970s were packed with plenty of other trucks that didn’t leave the same kind of marks in our collective automotive memories. Do you remember even five of these?

From touchscreens and push-button starters to rain-sensing wipers and voice controls, these 2000s car features once seemed futuristic—until drivers discovered how annoying they could be.

Remember the Suzuki Kizashi, Cadillac ELR, Buick Cascada or Nissan Murano CrossCabriolet? Revisit forgotten cars of the 2010s that disappeared surprisingly fast.