Honestly no clue... right now I have no commute to school. But I drive from LA to the Bay Area and back a few times a year. Next summer i have no idea what sort of commute I’ll have or where I’ll live and same goes for after graduation in two years.
We, then, need to clarify a few things:
1) When i said "commute," i meant how far are you from campus, or do you live on campus?
2) You claim to be "broke," yet your budget is $7000? And you have a late model car. Not attacking, just trying to clarify things here.
i daily drive an 83 truck (not a blazer, i know, but close enough....) with currently no back up car. However, my back up is taking a Lyft/rideshare if necessary. Or riding a bike. i live close enough to work where i could even walk if necessary although it would probably take an hour. Bus and train would take about the same time as walking.
My view is that IF, as in the above example, a vehicle is restored/or maintained to 83 standards----then it should perform to 83 standards----that is, reliably as it did when if rolled off the line. Let stuff go for too long and you can expect a failure; My philosophy is that if you are avoiding a monthly car payment by going used, then you can afford the very best components---even better than stock. Thus, your car is as reliable, if not more, than when it was new. Examples, Bosch alternators, Champion radiator, edlebrock wp etc. And going this way is still much cheaper than a monthly car payment.
i think most GM cars, specifically chevys, from 55 to say 96-ish are pretty easy cheap to fix maintain. i would even say easiest and cheapest of all manufacturers. RWD is easier to fix than FWD although fwd is not a disaster until maybe after 90. After say 2000 both RWD and FWD are difficult to fix (my opinion)
P.S. Blazers are even MORE EAsier to work on because of the increased ground clearance---you can get underneath them real easy.
