fluffy rambles: Principles have limits

Principles have limits

November 21, 2025 8:05 PM (3 months ago)

In 2022 I traded in my Mazda3 for a Nissan LEAF, which cost me about $1000 all-in. The LEAF was a pretty great car that I liked a lot, but it had a couple of critical features, namely that the lack of active battery thermal management meant that its range got super low in the winter and the battery was degrading quite quickly, and being stuck on CHAdeMO made it very stressful to find a quick charge the rare times when I needed one (which happened just often enough that I was getting worried).

So in 2024 I traded it in for a Kia Niro EV, which seemed to fix all of the problems with the LEAF, and which had plenty of great reviews, including from friends of mine. This trade-in ended up costing around $16,000.

A few months later it developed the dreaded “Wheel of Fortune” click. I brought it into the dealership. They held onto it for a whole fucking month while not working on it and losing my paperwork due to what turned out to be a minor clerical error, and in the end just drove it around the block and decided it didn’t have the problem. This was never fixed (although the noise did eventually resolve on its own).

I continued to never really feel comfortable driving it, and over the next couple years only ended up putting a couple hundred miles on it.

And now, and now, it turns out that the entire cooling system has succumbed to another defect that Kia refuses to address, and fixing that would cost an absolute shitload, and there’s no way I could get Kia to cover it under warranty (and trying to deal with the CarMax extended warranty also doesn’t feel, y'know, worth it).

For quite some time I’ve been wanting to go back to a simple stick-shift gas car, because I don’t like driving SUVs (they feel too detached from the road which triggers my anxiety) and I don’t like not having a stickshift (because it turns out that having the stickshift to focus on helps me with my anxiety too), but I’ve also held this principle that I never want to own a gas car again, because electricity is the future and is fungible and is clean and so on.

Right now the Nissan Ariya and Ford Mach-E (which are the only EVs I actually trust right now) are available for around $23K used, and I’d be able to trade in my Niro for around $14600, so it’d cost me around $8000 to upgrade to a car that I theoretically wouldn’t hate…

But having an EV has also been disproportionately penalizing, even without this endless cavalcade of fucking failures, and I just can’t help but be done at this point.

So I’m thinking I’m just gonna fuckin sell the Niro to Carvana (the offer for which would be $13,200) and buy some used stickshift gas car, because there are plenty around here in good condition for $10K or less. And then my registration fees plummet and maybe I’ll also feel like I’m actually in control of my vehicle.

I wouldn’t be able to keep using the Comma3 unless I find one with active lane keeping (which is unlikely at the pricepoint I’m looking for), but I could sell the Comma3 for a decent price, especially with how little-used it’s been, too, and I don’t think it’s really been doing me any good anyway.

I don’t need anything fancy. I just want a car that I can drive places without feeling like I’m going to die or like it’s going to catastrophically fail suddenly, and which doesn’t cost an absolute crapton to keep going or to keep legal.

I have principles but those principles have limits, and I’m not willing to keep paying this much for this level of bullshit in my life.

What’s really annoying is I just paid $550 to renew my tabs, too.