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The rise of the disposable car

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Re: The rise of the disposable car

#91

Post by emmelaich »

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…

The feel of a CVT in bigger vehicles is weird. Very difficult to get used to. Especially in ECO mode (Kia) which it defaults to.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#92

Post by jandrese »

kd5bjo wrote: post #49
sokoloff wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our CR-V was rear-ended. It's a great car and it's pretty likely to be totaled because the cost of repairs is going to end up being higher than the insurance company is willing to pay. (And then I expect it's going to be a massive fight for me to get paid enough to replace it like-for-like, but that's a separate issue from the overall footprint.) I don't see any reasonable way around this, though. If I have a car tha…

> I don't see any reasonable way around this, though. If I have a car that I could replace for $8K and would salvage for $1K, I can't reasonably expect someone else's insurance company to pay $12.5K in costs (for repairs plus rentals/loss of use plus diminished value plus incidentals) to put me back in a place where I then have a crash-repaired car worth $7K plus $1K in cash in my pocket for diminished value. The pro…

Here is another angle on that "sentimentality" you're talking about. If I've been following the book on every maintenance item, driving gently, and proactively going after any rust that starts to form on the vehicle that is then smashed up in an accident I don't want an "equivalent market value" used vehicle that was neglected and beat to shit by the previous owner just because it's the same make, model, and age. Especially since that previous owner was a chain smoker.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#93

Post by jandrese »

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.

Which also makes them cheaper to replace, which is good because you will likely need to replace it at least once in the lifetime of the car.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#94

Post by jandrese »

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...

That doesn't make sense. A family is by definition at least 2 people, so if they own two cars that's still one car per person.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#95

Post by bluGill »

Terr_ wrote: post #63
notjoemama wrote: post #44

GM requiring Google integration and eliminating Apple Car Play and Android Auto makes me think a brand new model is immediately disposable. If I have choice removed from me, in particular a choice I very much care about, then I’m going to care about owning that car less. The more that happens the more people may view vehicles as pure utility and much easier to walk away from for any reason, especially repair cost. Wh…

> If I have choice removed from me I think this points to a slightly deeper issue sitting just below "consumer choice", which is "tight coupling." It sounds like GM has made a tighter-coupling between their vehicle and one particular brand of smartphone, and that's suggestive that other tight-couplings might exist elsewhere the design. The more tightly-coupled parts (to particular brands, form-factors, and proprietar…

I think it is also a trust issue - GM doesn't trust Apple will approve updates to their iphone app and so won't risk it. Also Apple charges a lot of $$$ to car company to connect to carplay and I think GM called their bluff. I'm not sure what the costs to android auto are or why GM wouldn't still connect to that.

Note that as a consumer I don't trust anyone above. Sure GM's app will work great now, but in 3-6 years I expect they will decide drop support for my currently working car in their app. Apple and Google will also change their OS and so the app that does work with my car won't work anymore on new phones. I also expect updates to CarPlay/Android Auto that won't work with my old car in a few years. Nobody in this business wants to provide support for the average car which is currently 12 years old - unless you pay which someone driving a 12+ year old car won't want to do. (GM provides parts for those older cars, but people pay for those parts)

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#96

Post by jandrese »

nimbius wrote: post #86
jandrese wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's usually not the engine that fails. The transmission is far more likely to be the weak point, and after that it is rust destroying the body or frame. The average age of a car is like 13 years old. Most people are definitely not buying new ones every 5 years.

I agree, a transmission is really only good for around 200k miles. However, you can buy a used transmission in most cases for under 3 grand, and again labor for this thanks to automation is likely less than $500. The real blocker I dont mention is time. Your shop will need that car for a few days and shipping will take time too. At some point the wait isnt worth it anymore. The upside is, 2 used Toyotas are still che…

That and you're not getting another 200k miles out of that used transmission.

The other thing that people don't talk about as much is the parts market got seriously messed up during COVID and still hasn't fully recovered. It's more common now for repair parts to either be unavailable or enormously marked up. Like a particular repair might only take a few hours and what should be a few hundred bucks in parts, but the car gets totaled because one of the parts is unavailable or inexplicably costs thousands and the shop doesn't want the liability of hacking together an alternative solution. Especially if the missing part is an ECM or sensor or something else that might make the car fail an inspection.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#97

Post by doubled112 »

nimbius wrote: post #86
jandrese wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's usually not the engine that fails. The transmission is far more likely to be the weak point, and after that it is rust destroying the body or frame. The average age of a car is like 13 years old. Most people are definitely not buying new ones every 5 years.

I agree, a transmission is really only good for around 200k miles. However, you can buy a used transmission in most cases for under 3 grand, and again labor for this thanks to automation is likely less than $500. The real blocker I dont mention is time. Your shop will need that car for a few days and shipping will take time too. At some point the wait isnt worth it anymore. The upside is, 2 used Toyotas are still che…

Dealers are charging about $200/hr labour in my area. Independent shops are $150/hr and up.

I don't think anybody is replacing my transmission for $500.

Did you mean the whole job for less than $5000?

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#98

Post by sokoloff »

linkjuice4all wrote: post #67
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

The change to unibody construction in the 70s/80s and the more-recent move to 'gigapressing' an entire car with body work has unfortunately made repair much more difficult. In the past body shops would realign frames, pull body work back into shape, and weld in new pieces but it's just not safe and practical to do that with unibody vehicles even if you did have the tooling and machinery to ensure that it was done rig…

> weld in new pieces but it's just not safe and practical to do that with unibody vehicles

Unibody cars are repaired safely all the time, whether for collision or rust repair. It may have been easier in the body-on-frame days, but it safe and practical now still.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#99

Post by bluGill »

ip26 wrote: post #10
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…

Every day in the United States, a large number of cars are being produced. Most of these cars never get sold to customers because people just can’t afford them. Oh yes, that makes perfect sense, every day they make 100 cars and then scrap more than 50 of them. The car manufacturing industry can’t stop producing new automobiles because they would have to close their factories and lay off thousands of their workers. Ri…

Layoffs do happen, but they are hard to do because the auto makers are selling some cars. The factory works at one speed, and so if they sell 100 cars but make 200 what can they do.

The above is why companies try to do just in time manufacturing. However this is always easier on paper than the real world. Those factories need to shutdown for a week-several months every year to repair tools and rearrange for the next model year, and they need some cars saved up for that. In addition other disasters mean sometimes they can't get parts and so there is more reason to have a buffer of unsold cars.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#100

Post by Rapzid »

dragontamer wrote: post #4

https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/avera... The opposite. With cars reaching much more advanced ages today, when a collision happens it's a write-off. The modern car isn't 'disposable'. In fact, all statistics point to us holding onto cars longer today than ever before. Today's cars are the most durable that they've ever been.

This is really good. The energy use for fabricating a car must be huge.
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