I honestly plan to buy whatever car out at the end of a lease. Really the lease would be a delay of my purchase as I am short on cash now, so I'd expect to put some money down at that time if I need to. I know I drive quite a few miles Shawn but I hate my POS honda which would prolly make it through another 20k miles if I put like 400 into it to fix a few things. I just want something with a warranty where I put gas/oil into, gets decent gas mileage and everything in the car works. Which is why I am going newer.
The whole 10k car deal requires effort to find cars often and then it also requires that I either fix a decent amount of things myself or pay to fix things that break on $10k cars.Plus I like new shit
But in all honesty, the Subaru lease and Kia one both seem pretty decent, the Kia one seems like a no brainer if I want that car.
Whatever I get, unless I hate it I'd plan to keep for at least 5 years, hopefully longer. All of my excess car money goes to the evo and fixing that and if I looked at another car I'd be upgrading/changing the evo not the DD.
And 40 miles on the volt gets me 2/3 of my daily miles but I refuse to buy a "government motors" vehicle. I should as we all own them and paid for them but I honestly think they make some pretty iffy cars. I like the cruz and the corvette, everything else is meh.