NA Miatas are becoming rarer, especially if yours is not modified to hell and back. And collector car prices have been climbing a lot recently.
Sure, but mine is a ~350k mile piece of shit with a salvage title after someone T-boned it at low speed, and I haven't made any real attempt to repair that damage. Nobody in their right mind looks at my Miata and thinks "collector car!"
Someone wants to build an Exocet or a Miata-kart out of it. I think that's where a lot of them have gone.
My mechanic does this! He loves to work on classic cars as a passion project and has a bunch of classics in his lot that he's slowly working on, however if you call him now, his voicemail says, "Please note if you are calling to inquire work on a model over 20 years old the waiting list is 5-6 months." He's a great guy- if anyone is in Bay Area and needs a good honest mechanic for foreign or domestic, shout out to Ja…
That message does nice double duty as a PC way of saying poors need not bother shopping him for a quote to replace something on their '99 Grand Caravan.
IIUC, you're implying that that mechanic is disdainful of poor customers, and that this just provides convenient political cover.
If so, I'm not sure why you'd assume that. It seems more likely to me that the mechanic is simply choosing his work based on personal interest and perhaps profitability. I don't see why we'd ask anything more than that from him.
anecdotally; the lower end of the car market doesn't really seem affected. prices for 10+ year old cars that aren't "nice" but are easily reliable with regular maintenance still seem widely available and cheap. tangentially; I have always seen the premium for a nice car to be a really low value at normal income levels.
I used to be able to pick up decent cars (something that needs a little work but runs and drives) for like $500-1000 all day long. Those days are gone. If it runs and drives, you're lucky to get it under $1500-2000.
Might their be some need to legislate chip allocation?
What would sink GDP more: one year of no new cars, or one year of no new phones? Which would have the greater domino effect on the economy?
Because auto manufacturers are such low margin, they can't buy chips reserved by monopoly businesses. But what happens when people can't afford a new phone because they can't get to work?
One of the other oddities of this market is that prices for "normal" cars have increased at a higher rate than prices for "upmarket" cars. There is now some pricing overlap that never used to be there.
This is interesting, can you give some examples?
As another poster noted, Kia is a particularly good example. I am trying to buy a Kia suv and would normally have thought of it as a mid- to lower-level consumer brand, but there’s insane markups and competition for them right now. The Sorento tends to be marked up $3-8k over msrp in the bay area, and I’ve seen the Telluride marked up $10k+. I went to test drive a Telluride; the first one was bought as I was getting in and the new owner shouted me out of the car, and the salesperson told me to decide whether I wanted the second one before I got back or he’d have it sold. Anecdotal, but he told me that folks who would usually go for a Range Rover like the style, so they’re happy to pay $60k for a marked up Kia versus $100k for whatever else they would have bought.
I bought a 2009 4Runner back in March for $15k. Back then $15k would buy you the nicest 4th Generation (03-09) 4Runner. Now days that seems to be the average asking price, most 4Runners from that generation are going for at least $12k (with over 200k miles) and the nicest ones (with low 100k miles) are fetching over $20k. That's 15k to 20k for a car that is 11 years old at it's youngest and mileage under 150k is cons…
4Runners are notorious for holding their resale value well since they're known to be very reliable vehicles that can run 400k miles+ if you take care of them. You can put Land Cruisers in this category too.