With all the information at our fingertips, buying a car is much less of a gamble than it used to be. Just enter your vehicle identification number on a site like Carfax and you’ll be able to quickly find out the car’s history. Still, many consumers find themselves spending tens of thousands of dollars on cars with performance or reliability issues.
With soaring car prices and rising interest rates, this is an especially costly mistake. The estimated typical monthly car payment reached a record high of $733 in July, according to the Cox Automotive/Moody’s Analytics Auto Price Index. According to the index, it takes an average of 42.2 weeks of income to buy the average new car, an increase of 15% year-over-year.
Given the cost, it’s more important than ever to avoid shelling out money on a car that could keep emptying your wallet due to maintenance and repair issues, or poor resale or trade-in value. Here are six American cars to avoid, based on various car review sites.
