That's a great article, very true and worth reading. One of the reason's I'm taking my 4Runner back and giving the ex-wife the Titan. I'm a Field Engineer for a Telecommunications company contracted to the Dept of Homeland Security, so I travel all over the country.... all the time. We use our vehicles for work and get compensated for it, although it's not quite enough to cover ALL the aspects of using my Titan on a daily basis.
I put 60,000+ miles on the Nissan in 11 months. That's 2 sets of tires (265 70x18's about $1000 a set), 12+ oil changes/tire rotations, and other various services in between. I was getting about 15-16 highway and about 12 city, without a trailer. With a trailer it was more like 13-14 highway and 8-9 city (and mountains).
The Titan is a very large, wide truck and not designed for trail riding in the mountains like my job entails very often. The wide stance grabbed a lot of attention from sticks and foliage on the side of the trails and it definately shows.
The point is, I didn't do near enough research about my job compared to the vehicle I bought to carry it out. I didn't think about spending (sometimes) $150+ in gas a day or that for a good 18" A/T tire I would spend about $1000 every 6 months.
I'm a little lucky or blessed because I'm in no danger of bankruptcy or anything like that but I can definately see how these things can happen. When you see something you think you really like or want you tend to forget about all the extra added cost's of owning that vehicle.
But seriously that article applies to me and my decisions that i made in the past, me and my wife bought cars before like it was just clothes and trading it in too soon (all financed) cars that in reality we could afford but with all the negative equity that we had put on each car that we traded we ended up in a deep hole... I'm thankful that the madness has ended and were now going the right path
