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The rise of the disposable car

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Re: The rise of the disposable car

#31

Post by yareally »

hindsightbias wrote: post #24
pfdietz wrote: post #3

For a humorous and oddly interesting YouTube view on what happens to bad engines in cars, see the I Do Cars YouTube channel. Come for the oil starvation, stay for the newly installed inspection ports. On a good day, he'll get some parts to sell from each core. He also occasionally goes through the process of pulling usable parts from an entire junked car. https://www.youtube.com/@I_Do_Cars

I'll add: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCarCareNut SUVs and smaller trucks are now almost universally moving to 4cyl and 6cyl turbos with iffy CVTs. The channels run by folks with greasy overalls are pretty uniform in saying these vehicles won't last like their predecessors (even the Toyotas).

Is this a genuine sentiment or just people upset that their favorite vehicle won't have a massive gas guzzling engine anymore? There are a number of people that also dislike trucks with aluminum bodies, despite that aluminum alloys can be strong (aircraft use them all the time) and it keeps your truck from turning into a rust bucket after 5 years of snowy winters. Car ownership is not always a rational thing and people will defend some strange platforms based only on emotion.

How are the CVTs in these trucks iffy compared to other CVTs? There's a number of reliable auto makers using CVTs for years, such as Subaru, Honda and even Toyota on their other vehicles. CVT transmissions have been in mass produced cars longer than most of us have been alive.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#32

Post by nradov »

dragontamer wrote: post #12
dsalfdslfdsa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP's article was careful to make this distinction, and I think it's very interesting (as well as being the crucial point of the article). Cars are now more reliable and last longer, but when they do develop a problem, it's less economically viable to repair them.

The definition of 'Totaled' is when a comparable car on the used market can replace your vehicle for less than or equal to the repair costs. As such, it makes no sense to repair a totaled vehicle. You should instead buy a comparable used vehicle. But saying the word 'Disposable' is pretty bad with regards to the headline. It doesn't capture the full effect of what the stats are showing. That is, we are all keeping ve…

It makes sense to repair a totaled vehicle if you can do most of the repair work yourself instead of paying the market rate. A friend has an older Volkswagen Jetta that was hit from behind at an intersection. There was no frame damage or airbag deployment but the insurance company totaled it because inflation has driven labor charges for simple repairs to ridiculous levels. My friend took the insurance payout and repaired it himself using a junkyard bumper. Works fine. But he had more free time and better mechanical skills than most people.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#33

Post by its_ethan »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #23
dragontamer wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of 'Totaled' is when a comparable car on the used market can replace your vehicle for less than or equal to the repair costs. As such, it makes no sense to repair a totaled vehicle. You should instead buy a comparable used vehicle. But saying the word 'Disposable' is pretty bad with regards to the headline. It doesn't capture the full effect of what the stats are showing. That is, we are all keeping ve…

> As such, it makes no sense to repair a totaled vehicle. You should instead buy a comparable used vehicle. I sometimes wonder how much the carbon footprint of the auto industry would change if people preferred to fix them instead of throwing the whole thing away just because of a fender bender or an expensive part broke

I think the issue is mostly from misaligned motivations from insurance companies and car manufacturers.

On the insurance side, they're motivated by finances. If the quote to fix a car is $10k and the car itself was only worth $8k, the insurance company is just going to give you $8k to find yourself an equivalent car to the one you "totaled". There's no intrinsic motivation for the insurance company to go for the $10k repair? Maybe allow them to have carbon credits or something for spending an extra $2k to keep the same car on the road? How do you tease out how much of a carbon win this is? (and who is in charge of deciding that?)

So then on the car manufacturer side, they're motivated by sales/ brand reliability. Maybe if cars were more repair-friendly that would help change the equation? That comes with the potential trade-off of new cars being more expensive and/or less reliable if they can't be as tightly integrated as they currently are. So if car manufacturers are motivated to make the most reliable/cheap car, they are going to forgo making them less repairable.

If you try and get both sides of this equation onto the same page, I don't know that you could trust that there wouldn't be some under the table shenanigans going on without making things so overregulated that both new cars and car repairs are both more expensive?

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#34

Post by currymj »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #28
jseliger wrote: post #9

I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems. Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...

We’ve been “close” for 10+ years now. We are not close.

5 years ago you couldn't hop in a commercial self-driving taxi in a major US city. Now you can. The progress has been slower than everyone's predictions but it is still substantial.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#35

Post by sarchertech »

its_ethan wrote: post #33
StableAlkyne wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As such, it makes no sense to repair a totaled vehicle. You should instead buy a comparable used vehicle. I sometimes wonder how much the carbon footprint of the auto industry would change if people preferred to fix them instead of throwing the whole thing away just because of a fender bender or an expensive part broke

I think the issue is mostly from misaligned motivations from insurance companies and car manufacturers. On the insurance side, they're motivated by finances. If the quote to fix a car is $10k and the car itself was only worth $8k, the insurance company is just going to give you $8k to find yourself an equivalent car to the one you "totaled". There's no intrinsic motivation for the insurance company to go for the $10k…

If you priced carbon emissions for building the car into the cost of new cars, it would fix this. In the case of your example, the used car would be worth more than $8k because new cars would be correspondingly more expensive.

Of course the problem is as you said how do you price carbon emissions.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#36

Post by kube-system »

dragontamer wrote: post #12
dsalfdslfdsa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP's article was careful to make this distinction, and I think it's very interesting (as well as being the crucial point of the article). Cars are now more reliable and last longer, but when they do develop a problem, it's less economically viable to repair them.

The definition of 'Totaled' is when a comparable car on the used market can replace your vehicle for less than or equal to the repair costs. As such, it makes no sense to repair a totaled vehicle. You should instead buy a comparable used vehicle. But saying the word 'Disposable' is pretty bad with regards to the headline. It doesn't capture the full effect of what the stats are showing. That is, we are all keeping ve…

> The definition of 'Totaled' is when a comparable car on the used market can replace your vehicle for less than or equal to the repair costs.

Only in Texas and Colorado. Almost all states require cars to be declared a total loss before that.

The most common definitions are

1. The Total Loss Formula, which is when the value of the car is less than or equal to the repair costs plus the salvage value of the vehicle

2. 75% threshold -- which is when the repair costs are 75% of the price to replace your vehicle

https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/total-loss-thresholds....

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#37

Post by userabchn »

jseliger wrote: post #9

I live in Phoenix and now take Waymo regularly, and it seems like we're close to a world in which most people take self-driving cars most of the time, crash rates plummet, and these kinds of articles come to resemble articles from 1910 about horse-related problems. Humans suck at driving: https://jakeseliger.com/2019/12/16/maybe-cars-are-just-reall...

I wonder what we are going to do with all of the car parking that will become as obsolete as horse stables.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#38

Post by pfdietz »

yareally wrote: post #31
hindsightbias wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll add: https://www.youtube.com/@TheCarCareNut SUVs and smaller trucks are now almost universally moving to 4cyl and 6cyl turbos with iffy CVTs. The channels run by folks with greasy overalls are pretty uniform in saying these vehicles won't last like their predecessors (even the Toyotas).

Is this a genuine sentiment or just people upset that their favorite vehicle won't have a massive gas guzzling engine anymore? There are a number of people that also dislike trucks with aluminum bodies, despite that aluminum alloys can be strong (aircraft use them all the time) and it keeps your truck from turning into a rust bucket after 5 years of snowy winters. Car ownership is not always a rational thing and peop…

CVTs are also much cheaper to manufacture than traditional transmissions.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#39

Post by sarchertech »

rob74 wrote: post #22
beretguy wrote: post #5

Tangential but related: There are full parking lots with brand new cars that go under press or get disassembled for parts because dealership don’t want sell them at a cheaper prices. https://www.costulessdirect.com/blog/where-brand-new-unsold-... From article: > the unsold cars that are older than two years old, will have no alternative but to be either crushed, dismantled and/or their parts recycled. Want to see for…

> currently, there are 6 billion people on our plant, and 10 billion running cars. This is because most families own an average of two to three cars False and false. According to more reputable sources, there are only ~ 1.5 billion cars in the world. And to the many families that own two or more cars in the US , there are many more families that own 0 cars elsewhere in the world...

Not to mention that families are composed of more than one person, so families owning more than one car doesn’t get you to more cars than people.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#40

Post by yareally »

pfdietz wrote: post #38
yareally wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a genuine sentiment or just people upset that their favorite vehicle won't have a massive gas guzzling engine anymore? There are a number of people that also dislike trucks with aluminum bodies, despite that aluminum alloys can be strong (aircraft use them all the time) and it keeps your truck from turning into a rust bucket after 5 years of snowy winters. Car ownership is not always a rational thing and peop…

CVTs are also much cheaper to manufacture than traditional transmissions.

That doesn't alone make them terrible though. CVTs have less complexity, so they will be cheaper. Dependable cars have CVTs for reasons other than cheapness.

For example, a dual clutch transmission is complex and expensive, but at the same time, I wouldn't call it better. There's tradeoffs in all types of transmissions. My car might have one, but if I were driving a truck, I don't think I would want a DSG.

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