Ok, I'm finaling going to chime in.
I feel simlar to the OPs for this and the "OK d, so there is one really poor person buing this car" thread. Mainly I feel this way based on my age (26), and the fact that I have only purchased one car in the past for 14k, and my wife bought a used one for a couple thousand. That being said, there is a lot more to think about. This decision is entirely situation dependent, and each person is on their own.
I realize our income is well above what some people are saying is necessary to purchase the fully loaded car, while it is slightly less than what others are saying is necessary. But a big part of this decision is that you only live once.
If you have a positive cash flow, you can (like we are) save up over the period you are waiting for a down payment. We have a house we've put money into for the last year, and that is where all of our cash flow is going. But by pushing the last couple of major projects off until we have to pay for the car, we are going to create a down payment. At that time, we will have to look at the loan options available. If the loan options are for a large enough value at a low enough interest rate, we may reduce our down payment so we can utilize some of that money towards the projects in our house (and enjoy them before we are forced to move for our jobs and rent our house). Personally, I'm fine with paying a few thousand extra in interest if I feel the car is worth it to me (not in resale value), since first and foremost I am buying it to drive it. In our case, if we had to finance it all, we could pay the payments entirely with a pay raise we receive in the spring. This would allow us not to change our current habits, yet still pay for the car. (My enter key stopped working or something, so I'm going to continue in a second post rather than continue to make this paragraph a novel).
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Also, your tax situation could change the cost of the car dramatically. For us, we are just above the cut off (in the non-bush tax cuts) from 15 and 28% taxes. Depending on which tax things congress cuts, we might be able to go below the cutoff for the 15% by deducting the sales tax of the car (if congress doesn't nix it). That would mean that purchasing the car might save us $8,700 in taxes on top of the $7500 credit. Also for the full $7500 credit (assuming no investments/mortgage/other deductions), an individual has to have a $53,800 taxable income and a married couple filing jointly would need to have $57,600. This is based on $50,000*.15=7500 and the individual personal exemption is $3,800 per person. Bottom line, everyones situation is different, there might be other ways the car pays for itself, and if you don't understand your own taxes and the proposed changes in congress GET INFORMED. Our taxable income (between 60-80k) could see a significant change in tax. We could go from about 8k/year in taxes to 28k in taxes/year depending on what changes congress makes (to be fair, i should state our taxable income could increase to nearly 100k with certain changes to deductions).
