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More Than 80 Percent Of Americans Can’t Afford New Cars
(jalopnik.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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shrug and?
I know most people want "New cars" and fine, go chase that over priced luxury, but I'd rather a car that's 1-2 years old that's dropped more than half the price, and being passed over because new shiny thing came out.
People shouldn't have to drive beaters, but buying a car for 10k isn't a bad decision unless you're extremely well off our only care about status symbols.
Like there's a reason I was able to buy a house, and a good job helped, but also my wife and I lived with in our means, which is something I feel that isn't talked about in the consumerism age. (You can buy something new, but for most things you don't need a yearly iphone/car/or anything. A good 50 inch tv works well for a tenth of the price of the newest one. ) And yet I see people complain about not having a lot of money yet they're always talking about the newest graphics cards, newest tvs, and newest tech.... I wonder why.
Except that doesn't really happen anymore. Shoot, I've seen some cars appreciate in value after they roll off the lot in recent years. Hoping that reverses soon, but it sure isn't like it used to be.
Take the Toyota 4runner for example - they're incredibly reliable because they are simplistic in many ways with bullet proof components. You can even find 5 year old models that are within 5k of a new one.
Look at this guy with his $10k...
Get a better job. If you can't afford a $10k car, you're doing something wrong...
You understand that if someone in a low paid job gets a better paid job, the low paid job does not disappear in a puff of smoke? That the proportion of people in low paid work is a function of political decisions as to what the economy should look like?
I mean, the headline is fucking ridiculous (we don't need anything like 10% of car sales to be new cars). But so is giving careers advice as a solution to the high prevalence of shit pay.
Why don’t I strap on my job helmet and squeeze down into a job cannon and fire off into job land, where jobs grow on jobbies?
The only thing that's being done wrong here is you defending the system and not the individual.
Yeah it's insane. I bought a 1 year old Hyundai and knocked tons of depreciation off an already cheaper brand.
At my work people be driving around in leased Range Rovers/AMG Mercs. Then they will take the piss out of my car.
Seriously? I now have more disposable income because i'm not wasting it renting a car and also I own my car... It should be me bragging
I got a 2021 car last year with 6000km on it . It was almost full price .
Probably because it only had 6000 km on it. Average is closer to 15000 km/year.
Don't look at pickup prices. Mine was worth the same at 2 years as new.
A decade ago I was able to buy a shitbox Silverado 1500 crew cab for under $15k that ran till it rusted out from under me halfway back from the moon. It hauled garbage, pig feed, and two moves without a complaint. Same truck today would be $30k minimum and at that price I'd be too afraid of scratching it to have any fun.
So sell it and get new
I have a 2020 rav4 and it is only valued at $3k less than what I paid for it brand new. This isn’t a reality anymore.
Arguable the case for purchasing a brand new vehicle starts to make more sense as BEV become the majority as the batteries are a consumable that degrades with use and time. So long as the increased price is offset by the longer utilization of that battery.
Yeah, of course... But they're also replaceable. You can even check the individual cells, swap out the worst ones with cells from other used packs, and end up getting back up to decent capacity. There's a whole statistics, mean time to failure aspect to batteries - it's not going to take them back to new, but swapping out the worst cells can get you a lot better performance
Or you could just replace the batteries with newer, likely better, battery banks. The first option needs a certain scale, but would be cheap, the second would be a straight range upgrade over even the factory range.
There's also the fact that electric cars are much more mechanically simple - this is unlikely to catch on under our current economic system, but it's way easier to swap electric motors than an engine...
My points being, I think we need to make way less cars, and electric cars are actually easier to repair (at least from a physics and resource perspective, hostile design and economic pressures could easily eat up that difference)
we need right to repair laws for cars so this is possible
The problem with replacing individual cells is you'll end up with cells with different wear levels which means different discharge rates and capacities (max voltage). The battery management system can mitigate some of the problems that arise but can only do that while chargering. While the battery is in use or sits for an extented period of time the cells will try to level out the voltage difference causing loss in capacity and a potential fire risk if the cells are too out of balanced.
Replacing the battery with new better batteries isn't really an option either as any significant increase in power density would be from a change in battery chemistry and that would also require changing out the on board charging circuit and related systems. There's also the issue that the majority of charge points providers state in their TOS that the use of any aftermarket parts or modifications to your battery or charger is forbidden so you are essential blacklisted from using any DC fast charger.
That's why I mentioned pairing cells from multiple used battery packs... This isn't magic, it's numbers... You pair like with like, and by removing the underperforming cells, you get rid of the dead cells bringing down the whole bank because they can't hold a charge. The fire risk is also greatly overstated... Batteries and management circuits have come a long way. You could swap in new cells and it would be fine... It would just be a waste, the new cells would degrade faster than their spec sheet implies.
And as far as matching like with like, you can build a lithium cell tester at home to profile each cell for a few dozen dollars... Literal hobbiest level stuff
And you most definitely can upgrade with newer, better batteries. There's three numbers - energy density, voltage, and discharge rate. You can upgrade the density to the moon, so long as the other two match it's a drop in replacement... And these three things are a tradeoff when you build the battery, so a better battery bank with the same output and voltage is just going to make you car run further, easy as that.
Yeah, TOS might stand in your way, but that's economic pressures, not an engineering issue. We could entirely solve that problem through force of law. On the topic, let me take this opportunity to promote right to repair - companies are going to feed us a lot of bullshit reasons why we need to throw it all away and replace everything fresh... They have every incentive to make us believe that. It's less work for them to say "that's not an approved use", they make far more money if they convince us they are the only ones that can fix it... it's an economic alignment problem, the engineering solution is well understood
the problem is the basic cost of living is going up beyond what can be afforded and people scream at you about not making extremely bad decisions you didn't even make and don't have to in order to end up struggling.