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2026 Chevrolet Trax LS or 2025 Nissan Sentra S?
I'm looking for the cheapest new car I can buy near me and these seem to be my choices. They are both within $100 of each other (about $19,500 including dealer fees, not including the 7% sales tax), so the price is basically identical.
Pros for the Trax: Larger, so more storage and easier to fit inside (I'm a big guy). I live in South Florida so the fact that it's higher off the ground helps to deal with flooded streets, plus I keep seeing sedans destroy their front bumpers on parking stoppers.
Pros for the Sentra: Higher MPG (34 vs 30). Easier to park.
Advice?
EDIT: Never mind, the Trax uses some kind of weird fuel called E85. I've got no interest in that. Sentra it is.
For me
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The Trax CAN use E85, but I cannot find anywhere that it MUST use it; it's a "flex-fuel", you can use normal gasoline in it just fine.
No option for the Hyundai Venue? Or Kia K4? That last one I think compares favorably to the Sentra on most metrics. The Venue is less of an apples to apples comparison, but if you are specifically not enthused by sedans, then a wee subcompact crossover might do it more for you.
Also, as an aside, are you planning on buying the car to ride it until it falls into rust? If not, the value retention should enter into your calculation I think. Buying "the cheapest car outright" can end up being a bad long term financial decision in a much more real and significant way than other purchases. A car that costs 20000$ but is worth 3000$ in 10 years when you want to get rid of it, vs a car that costs 25000$ but is still worth 10000$ in 10 years requires some thought. With that in mind, if you were able to stretch that initial budget a bit more to reach the Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla, you get a car that is known to hold its value much better than the Sentra, or the unknown of the K4 (likely bad on value retention, if we go by its predecessor the Forte). Of course, opportunity costs and inflation have to be taken into account here.
Even if you do plan to ride the car until it dies, you should keep in mind that this is likely to happen significantly later for a Civic and a Corolla than for a Sentra. And that's without counting also the expected repair bills over the lifetime of the car. A recent study looking at what percentage of a brand's cars make it to 250 000 miles shows Toyota/Lexus and Honda/Acura taking the first four spots, with a significant gap until the cluster of other brands.
And finally, of course, I imagine you have your reasons to want a new car specifically, but the depreciation that hits it as soon as you leave the dealership is immense. And that's assuming you want to spend the same amount of money on a used car as on the new one; the opportunity cost of buying new rather than a serviceable used car at half the price while investing the difference somewhere it will appreciate rather than depreciate is very significant.
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Note that both of these manufacturers offer powertrain warranties of only 60,000 miles. Other manufacturers (Hyundai, Kia, and Mitsubishi) offer 100,000-mile powertrain warranties.
Those combined fuel-economy numbers assume that your driving is 45 percent on highways and 55 percent in cities. Use the noncombined numbers to calculate the difference in terms of money spent on gasoline, based on your actual driving habits.
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