The decision to fix up your old car or buy a new one is something we all face at one time or another.

The Iowa Department of Transportation faces the decision on a much larger scale when it comes to its fleet of big orange snowplow trucks — but they now have some hard data from analysts at Iowa State University to help them out.

ISU associate professor of information systems Kevin Scheibe and his fellow researchers went through 10-years of maintenance records. “We found that given the age of the vehicles and the amount of time and money that it takes to keep them up that there is a point where it is more expensive to keep the aging vehicle than it is to replace it with newer technology,” Schiebe says.

Read the full article on the Radio Iowa website.