My folks gave me their 2017 Chrysler Pacifica when they were downsizing. It was worth about $20,000 in early 2020. I appreciated the gift and it was a nice van, but its also a Chrysler and that means a raft of electrical and mechanical issues are right around the corner so after driving it for ~15k miles I sold it late 2021 for about $24,000 without any effort. (I’m sure I could have done better private party, but I just went with the best offer from Carmax/Carvana/etc to get it out the door quickly)
Both the used and new vehicle markets have been nuts for months and months.
This summer we were compelled to buy a new car after some bozo rear-ended us while we were on a road trip. Insurance company totaled the car. I was really freaking out for a while, especially after looking at the insane asking prices for newer used cars and seeing the sheer lack availability for anything new.
In the end we ended up getting the car we wanted at a slightly higher price than we would have paid before the pandemic, but I was definitely having some anxiety about the whole thing.
I drove a '96 Toyota pickup for a while in 2018-19. Two problems: finding a shop to work on it that could get parts at a reasonable cost; & repeated theft of the truck itself. I’m much happier now, with a bike & public transit.
This could be a result of the manufacturers listening to their accounting/finance teams. Most likely, it’s more profitable to target the higher end of the market. The cost of production of a lower end car vs a higher end probably isn’t that great, so the marginal profit for the higher end makes it worth it.
That can’t last, though, IMO. This is gonna open it up for someone, like maybe a Chinese manufacturer, to come in to scoop up the lower end. (I think this is my second prediction in this one comment section!)
I’d like to think this would inspire some changes, but one of those core changes would need to be completely re-designing (and re-building) American cities to not require automobiles, which isn’t going to happen…
Cities can change that way. It’s a slow process but it happens. The catch is that the city in question already has to be prosperous enough to afford things like well-funded (i.e. safe, reliable, extensive, frequent) mass transit and bikeshare programmes and have a leadership culture that’s committed, through multiple administrations, to follow through. There are a dozen or so large cities in North America that meet those criteria and they tend to be the same ones with housing affordability crises.
Yeah, down here in the valley, public transportation is pretty much nonexistent and bikes for 20-30 mile commutes? With no bike lanes? 2 or 3 times per day? Hope your life insurance is paid up.
You got the last reliable year. My 2010 Prius is dead in the driveway in need of all new suspension and at least rear brake pads, if not new calipers, which implies it needs new rotors, too. Does yours have any of the exhaust heat shields left on it?
I’d sell it if I could get a new car, but there’s only trucks in the dealer’s lots, and I do not want a truck, I want a plug in hybrid. Maybe there will be more variety available by September.
I could tell that used car prices were nuts when my brother had to spend $5000 to get an old MG that had been sitting for 40 years, to fix up for the next Lemons Rally. A few months ago, I sold the hearse we ran a few years ago for 30% more than anyone offered me in 2019.
So it’s affecting all sectors of the used car market, not just the cars that an average person would want to drive.
“Slow” is one way to put it - we have extensive suburbs in parts of the US that require automobiles to function (and even then, often only barely, if you look at Southern California). It takes only a few decades for a city that was livable without a car to build out to the point that one is required, but the reverse doesn’t happen that quickly, because it requires nothing less than undoing those suburbs. If not destroying them, then radically reorganizing them (which probably does mean destroying a lot of them). That’s something that would require either the better part of a century or a really big (series of) disaster(s). (Which, given how things are going, is probably the most likely route to real urban planning in the US.) But that creates its own problems, as disasters result in desperate, hurried, thoughtless responses more often than seeing it as an opportunity to make things better.
Meanwhile the mere presences of public transport doesn’t help if it takes an hour or more to replace a 15 minute car ride. Public transportation becomes the last resort of the poor, and as the ranks of the poor grow, that just means more tightly stretched transportation budgets, not the means (even if there’s increasing pressure) for reorganizing urban spaces.
Where I am in the SF Bay Area, there’s public transportation, but it’s (at best) four times slower than driving and sometimes even slower than walking, depending on where you’re going. They’ve added a lot of bike lane infrastructure, but it’s so piecemeal as to be useless - you can’t go far without running into an area that’s extremely hairy or outright impassible on a bike. It’s just not a workable replacement for driving.
It’s not so much the printing money at the heart of it, it’s the failure to tax it out of existence (a.k.a. Taxing corporations and the rich). Companies and high-net-worth individuals plant themselves legally in the tax havens and hoard their wealth like dragons.
There certainly isn’t “loose money” to be found in 90% of the world’s population. Maybe even 99%.
Or states could mandate/incentivize companies to have workers who don’t need to be in the office to stay WFH or hybrid. The result would be way less traffic and higher efficiency with less need for everyone in a family to have a car.
Well, “everyone in the family doesn’t need a car” still isn’t “no one in the family needs a car,” which we’re pretty far from achieving, even if people work from home. Part of expectations for long-term work-from-home arrangements seems to be that people are moving out into more remote suburbs, making the situation worse. People are willing to do a lot more driving a couple times a week compared to what they’re willing to do twice a work day.
I can confirm that used trucks cost about as much as new ones, because no one can get either, and even as of last February, all of what was available on lots within a multi-hundrd-mile radius of me were the highest trim levels. I ended up getting a 5 yr 10k mile/year lease, because it was the only way I could afford the kind of vehicle I needed, and I plan to buy it at the end of the lease, both because I will be way over miles and because it’ll be worth way more than the buyout price.
That is pretty much exactly what happened last time from what I gather.
The long lease terms, and at the time crazy low rates, were targeted at first time car buyers. Or first time at a dealer buyers. Those millennials that just “don’t want cars”. When car sales started to pickup, heavily, all those incentives and low lease payments just made leasing, then buying the car at the end far cheaper than buying. Even over buying used.
It’s precisely real estate prices that are driving people to much cheaper areas if they don’t have to deal with a commute. From what I’ve been reading, it’s been a real trend since covid.
I’m getting the opposite read. If you already have a set rent/mortgage, you’re holding onto it, because moving, even “out into the country” is more expensive than what you already have.
