Daughter wants a used 2015 Chevy Spark LS...

[laazrakit 0]

I'm sure you all get annoyed by topics like this, but I'm a father who's wondering...

 

My daughter is looking for an inexpensive car to take to school. We've found a 2015 Chevy Spark LS for sale and she's fallen in love with it. I've done some reading online and there's some scary stuff out there. One plus, is that this is a manual transmission. If it had a CVT, we'd already be looking at something else. It does have 101,000 miles on it. The woman who owns it is dumping it since the warranty is done. That leads me to the fact that there are some maintenance records for the car, included very regular oil changes. Overall, it does seem like a decent vehicle, but the fact that I can't find many of these Sparks with high miles (say, over 150,000) on 'em around leads me to think that maybe they're not capable of going that long. I guess I'm wondering if there's been a general consensus in here regarding the  long-term viability of there little cars. Any help would be most appreciated.

[Bobby MSME 100]

I owned only used cars with manual transmissions until 1964, when I bought a new 1964 Corvair with manual tranny. It had lots of engine issues. So I traded it for a 1967 new Chevy Impala with Automatic and never bought a manual transmission  again since I never had a single repair issue with automatics over 55 years of driving them. But those manual transmissions I have owned had  throwout bearing issues, slipping clutch issues, gear shift sticking issues. Based on my 60 years experience driving cars, automatic transmissions are the best thing invented since sliced bread. But the CVT is a different animal and at this writing, my nearly 3 year old Spark CVT is functioning great, but who knows if it will last 10 years and 100k miles without issues.