With very few exceptions this is true. Anything that depreciates some 20% in value as soon as you drive it off the dealer lot makes for a pretty lousy investment.
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& @KathyPartdeux, OT from the original, it depends on how you define investment.
If you mean direct resale value, then no. If you mean “enables me to get to work so I can earn the money needed to survive”, then yes it does.
The same with real estate. Homeowners can go on and on about maintenance and taxes and boom and bust markets and talk how renting doesn’t make you deal with that, not knowing or forgetting what it’s like to have a series of shitty landlords, which can affect your credit rating, let alone the number it does on your mental health. If you hear about poor people talking about home ownership as an investment, quite possibly that is what they’re talking about. Not the money, but the perceived privacy and stability.
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Used 2012 Tesla Model S these days are going for ~1/3 what the coworker paid for it. And he did drive it. Saw it most days on the company lot, so its got miles.
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And for 7 years he’s had a super fancy car, and not paid a dime in gas. Was there another $90k luxury car that would have been a better deal?
Also, did he get in on their full maintenance window?
There are good questions about whether real estate is a good investment either, at least for single family situations. When real estate people show you numbers, their they are always lying or blithely ignoring things like maintenance, insurance, the fact that most people don’t actually qualify for tax deductions, etc. In places where mortgages aren’t significantly lower than comparable rents, owning is at best a wash, and at worst much less lucrative than investing your excess in a mutual fund.
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… When they’re paying attention. Tesla’s marketing videos make a point of showing “drivers” eating or typing on their laptops or playing on their smartphones while the car steers itself. Can they override the self-drive feature in the time it takes an attacker to swerve them into oncoming or off a high overpass? Would they notice if the car takes them somewhere other than their programned destination before it was too late?
I’m still about $35.00/hour below the point where I could reasonably afford a Tesla-sized car-loan. But even if I won the next $500 million USD Powerball jackpot and Musk himself dropped off a top of the line Tesla with my name on the vanity plate, I would take it straight to the nearest digital security firm (on a flatbed and with the battery leads disconnected), and hire them to run through their entire repertoire of ‘grey hat’ attacks, followed by patching those holes as firmly as possible.
And then package their findings into a tidy little report, which I will then pay to have distributed so widely that it will show up in the onboard memory of children’s toys for the next twenty years.
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Again, you are focusing on a single aspect. The money.
Maybe the stability, and the privacy are investments in one’s mental health and wellbeing. Just because those things can’t be reduced to a dollar figure doesn’t mean that they don’t have worth.
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It’s possible…but not necessary. Knowing that you can only pay your mortgage if you maintain your current income and that if the sewer cracks in the slab that you’re basically SOL has its own stress.
So, my concerns, my issues are unnecessary?
I can only continue to pay rent if my income continues to rise, let alone stay stable. I have pay my own utilities, but am restricted in that I can’t install more efficient appliances than what my landlord already has. Someone I don’t really know has access to all of my things and if they think that they can make more money by kicking me out and making superficial changes, I am SOL.
I never said home ownership was without stress. But you seem very interested in dismissing reasons that people might have other than yours as having validity.
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I don’t drive, there aren’t remotely enough trains, and given the rate at which that kind of infrastructure is added, there will be more sometime between the period of time after I’m dead and never. (Regardless of how much money they spend.) Autonomous vehicles dangle the hope of it happening on a reasonable timetable. (Whether it’s a reasonable hope is another issue, of course…)
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The line of thought that created the problem is not going to solve the problem.
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I have just taken a self driving train. It uses 1990’s technology and some safety systems are electromechanical, with relays and solenoids. The problem is that public rail and light rail infrastructure was dismantled starting in the '60s, and private cars were pumped. But like a passenger ship isn’t the best solution to make a trip between New York and Porto, maybe using a car or la lorry isn’t always the best solution.
I think that a self-driving tram it’s a better and more viable solution, because the the tramways has to me made at purpose, it’s easy to add sensors, extra safety measures and barriers to make the system safer.
Idiots that will jump the fences protecting the tramway or train rails will be always present, but happened also with electric and horse powered trams.
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The navigational problems for a train or tram are reduced to one dimension, making automation in that area relatively simple (though still very complex).
The automated transit system in Kuala Lumpur is awesome.
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I think Tesla ought to do more of this sort of “Boston Dynamics abusing its robots” announcements to remind people that although its nav systems are getting pretty sophisticated, they are still not even at the level of a horse, and trusting them would be worse than trusting a horse because the cars lack the horse’s sense of self-preservation.
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I remember driving through a village in Wales at night, years ago, and having to stop because what I had taken to be a straight road with lights re-arranged itself into something else, with the straight line of lights being a lamp-post, an upper window light, another light from a different street further up the hill, and perhaps another house light.
People do exactly this. This is so rare, that we do not have techniques for avoiding it, other than braking when things get weird, which self-driving cars do too. The nice things about an autopilot is that it can log what it senses, and any new experience can be shared between all of them.
It would be good to have a perfect autopilot, but really all an autopilot has to do is to be better - hopefully significantly better - than the usual well-oiled nut behind the steering wheel that is the cause of most accidents. According to some, we are already at that point. If not, then we are close. It’s all happening fast. An essential part of any further improvement has got to include logging many miles on public roads under real conditions.
Jeez, I am in my sixties, and you lot seem old and crotchety; and I bet some of you are half that. When I am eighty, I will want a car that can drive better than I can. If you stop it happening, and I back into you as a result, remember you got fair warning.
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You think that’s fun, try taking it out on snowy, slushy roads.
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I was wondering if anyone actually read that part. Sensationalist journalism at it’s finest. Take a completely off the wall scenario and blow it up to incite paranoia.
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Something I have always wondered since Tesla’s autopilot was released… how does it handle going through construction zones? Ones where line paintings might lead you directly into a jersey barrier or off a cliff?
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I think it’s more of an expense on your investment- your time spent earning money in this case.
A $100,000 expense when $30,000 would serve the same function is a questionable expense (used Bolt etc). It’s really more of a recreation expense and status symbol display if this case.
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