Worst city to have a nice car

[Chicago60614]

Originally Posted by west336

I'll vote for Chicago, since you have the same parking issues that you'll find in NYC or DC plus the weather extremes are worse, and road salt destroys your car.

What year are all these cars??

[northbound74]

Originally Posted by pvande55

For modern cars road salt is no longer an issue, but for classic rods it is murder.

Road salt is no respecter of a car's age.
Many newer cars are absolute rust buckets underneath. It all depends on how often the owner washes it in the winter. Also some brands just hold up better than others. Fords are notoriously rust prone, while Hondas are not nearly as bad from what I've seen. Some cars have the optional undercoating which helps.

[415_s2k]

Boston. Since I'd spent my childhood in Seattle and my parents had a garage, I was horrified after I let my Boston-native ex borrow my car, and when she picked me up, both bumpers were spiderwebbed and had gouges from license plate screws in them. "Bumpers are for bumping into things," she said to me, like I had missed the most obvious thing in the world. People in Boston do, indeed, just bump into cars with abandon... you'll walk past a brand-new Audi, and its bumper is all cracked and gouged from love-tap after love-tap. If I end up going back home for school or something, I'm going to have to shell out an extra few hundred bucks a month for a place with a garage or a space, and swap out for a hardtop

LA's Koreatown is horrific. The parking is a disaster - there are nowhere near enough spaces - so consequently, space is at a premium, and people love tap your car way too much. In some of the areas around Beverly and Vermont, over towards Normandie and third, it's epic-horrible, and the theft is pretty awful too. After I moved and got a place with its own space, my car still got vandalized twice when parked in... let me be blunt... poorer areas. It wasn't a super-nice car, but it was a late-model Jetta VR6 with rims and tinted windows, and probably the newest car on the block by at least ten years when someone keyed it taillight-to-headlight. Just sockin' it to the man for parking his car in the 'hood to while he beds a native girl, I guess.

My S2000 got broken into three times in Seattle; twice on First Hill, and once in Maple Leaf, which is a pretty benign neighborhood. By contrast, my car has never been broken into in SF, and while my car was keyed up in LA, it was never actually broken into. One of the times my car got broken into in Seattle, when the realized there was nothing of value, they slashed my seats up for good measure.