Many of us don’t have the desire or ability to cough up $50,000+ for a badly made piece of shit that does nothing but violate our privacy and contributes to everything we hate about our cities.
This seems disingenuous. Privacy concerns are valid, but you can get a new car (Ford Maverick) for $25k. The hybrid powertrain would only be $1k more, for an ~40% reduction in fuel consumption
Yea I agree $40k is a bit disingenuous. But the cost of a car is more than the car itself. It’s better to view it as a ongoing expense of fuel, insurance, maintenance, etc. AAA estimates between 7-10k a year. https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/average-annual-cost-of-new-vehicle-ownership
For the business types, this is called total cost of ownership.
Between depreciation of resale value, the costs for fuel, maintenance, storage, insurance, etc. The actual cost of owning a car is significantly higher than what it says on the sticker.
I’m not a business type, but I took classes about it in college and some of the stuff I read was specifically saying that vehicles were easily one of the biggest cost sinks out of everything you will ever own. Aka, they have the most significant unrecoverable costs associated with them.
If you think about it for even a few seconds, that’s absolutely true, the vehicle loses a large portion of its value simply by being used at all. The fuel doesn’t add value to the investment, the maintenance doesn’t either. With another large investment, such as a house/real estate, if you do upgrades/maintenance/whatever to the property, the value of the house generally increases, the property generally doesn’t lose value over time, though it’s widely considered one of the worst types of investments to hold property for capital gains in the value of the property, it’s at least moving in the right direction. Install/repair the HVAC in a car, bfd. No significant change in value. Repair/upgrade the HVAC in a house, you can recover most of that cost if you need to sell the house.
Vehicles suck.
I wouldn’t own one except that I live in the middle of fucking nowhere. We neither have bus, train, nor taxi service where I live, and the Uber/Lyft/whatever ride apps might as well laugh in my face when I load them.
If you live anywhere with a functional transit system, buying a car is generally a bad move, financially.
Probably the only cost I would consider worse than a car is renting a place to live, unfortunately, many don’t have the choice of owning their living space, and since everyone needs somewhere to call home, you don’t really have a choice. With a vehicle, you don’t have to own one, as long as you live somewhere with alternatives available.
I disagree. In my experience with the younger folk, it’s almost always an issue that driving is way too expensive for what you get.
You can do almost everything that would’ve necessitated owning a car on the internet now, and the cost of your car payment, insurance and registration, and gas is just way too high for the things that still require it. It’s cheaper to just pay a taxi or find someone to give you a ride for the few times you actually need it.
You can’t get a maverick for 25k now and never have. It also goes up in price for the 25 model year and spans comfortably into the 40k range pre markup.
Uhm, I paid less than 25k for mine, and thousands of others did too. Sure, I had to pre-order because I knew they would never be in stock at that price and post covid backups. If you walked onto a lot to try to buy one, yeah, you were upcharged.
Now, if you were to buy one, yes, the base price is now essentially 25k vs 20k.
Maverick is not a car, it’s a two-ton truck that uses 3.8gal/100 MI. Also, there’s insurance and maintenance to worry about.
When used prices are not significantly lower, it is hard to make that choice over new with a manufacuturer’s warranty.
Used prices are ridiculous now.
