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The rise of the disposable car

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Re: The rise of the disposable car

#121

Post by vel0city »

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…

All dozen of my kids were conceived in the back of that 1997 Toyota Camry. The car was given to me from my Grandpa after he passed. All those memories from the past 27 years clearly has a ton of sentimental value; I put it at $2M. I'll settle for half of that though.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#122

Post by quadyeast »

sokoloff wrote: post #54
nytesky wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The total valued does not include the significant time of finding an equivalent vehicle at that price in the rough and tumble used car market. It also does not price in the significant risk that a used car of this vintage significant undisclosed defects that are hard to detect by inspection at purchase.

Agree on the first. In theory (and I think in practice), the second is priced into the used car market already.

... including the gently driven car that just got totaled.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#123

Post by vel0city »

sokoloff wrote: post #98
linkjuice4all wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Its considerably more labor intensive though, which means $$$.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#124

Post by WindyCityBrew »

nimbius wrote: post #75

The rich have been flogging this idea since cash for clunkers. That, because they run through cars like shit through a goose, you will too. Speaking as a master diesel mechanic, this is a deleterious line of thinking for anyone with less than a few million dollars. Every car has 20 years of parts, and most Japanese cars have closer into 50 years of parts. Any engine built after 2010 will likely last half a million mi…

(USA specific) Depending on the state, "totaled" might still mean YOU can't fix and drive your car again.

In Illinois, you can only retain a totaled vehicle if it was hail damage or it's a "vintage (9+ yr old) car.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#125

Post by skhunted »

constantcrying wrote: post #113
skhunted wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an environmental perspective it’s a good thing. Don’t know if that makes it worth it but we are creating far too much pollution.

Cars from the 50s are less energy efficient and require more overall resources to maintain than a new car. They are also significantly less safe.

I imagine the mining of materials, waste from discarded car, etc. makes up for these things but I don’t know. I do think overall we are a very wasteful society and we cause way too much pollution.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#126

Post by _yb2s »

nimbius wrote: post #75

The rich have been flogging this idea since cash for clunkers. That, because they run through cars like shit through a goose, you will too. Speaking as a master diesel mechanic, this is a deleterious line of thinking for anyone with less than a few million dollars. Every car has 20 years of parts, and most Japanese cars have closer into 50 years of parts. Any engine built after 2010 will likely last half a million mi…

Older cars are massively undervalued in the USA because of social norms, which is a massive opportunity to anyone willing to exploit it to get reliable transportation for nearly free. People are afraid that older cars are dangerous, unreliable, or (worst of all) will make you look poor, but all 3 are just misinformation.

Boats and airplanes are just as reliable when old as new because they're maintained well- and cars are the same. If you maintain an old car well, it doesn't really ever wear out, and stays as reliable as a new car.

It's also massively cheaper to maintain an old car well then to buy new ones even if you pay someone else to do it. People complain when they get a $1000 repair bill every few years for an older car so they will say "it's getting unreliable" and then consider paying up to $1000 a month for a new one. There is a middle ground where you pay maybe $1000-2000 every year to stay on top of stuff, and it stays reliable indefinitely.

Moreover, an older high end car is just so much nicer than a new car in the same price range. You can buy a well maintained low mileage older but high end Porsche, Audi, etc. for well under $10k on Craigslist these days and you'd have to be a car nerd to know it's not a new model. Is it cheap to maintain well? Not exactly, but it will be 1/10th the cost of a car payment on a new low end economy car, and you're driving a high end car. Plus, when you buy a 20 year old high end car and maintain it well, it will appreciate rather than depreciate in value. My daily driver is an older Porsche, and in 3 years of driving it, it has probably appreciated in value enough to make all of the maintenance, insurance, etc. free- basically a free car if you don't count the space in my garage it uses to keep it nice.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#127

Post by snakeyjake »

The increase in total loss designations by insurance companies is due to the extremely high costs charged by the shops contracted by them to do repairs.

The designation of a car as "totaled" is often an illusion and there is a thriving parallel market of auction houses, repair shops, salvage titling companies, and resellers who take the "ruined" cars, fix them, and sell them on the used market.

Insurance companies could deal directly with the lower cost shops but just like the Concur Travel cancer that is spreading across corporate America there are extremely perverse incentives between executives and boards to keep the system the way it is with all of the major players dealing only with each other.

There is probably an auctioneer within 30 minutes of where you are right now who will sell you a "total loss" car that you can repair, or have repaired, for a minuscule fraction of what an insurance contractor will charge-- often for less than the insurance payout (to both you and the adjuster).

Like all things fucked in our economy, the trend of exorbitant repair costs took off when private equity started buying up the regional insurance repair contractor near-monopolies like Service King (Carlyle Group) and Caliber Collision (Leonard Green).

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#128

Post by currymj »

lucianbr wrote: post #82
currymj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

65 years ago we had never traveled outside Earth's atmosphere. 50 years ago we had traveled to the Moon. Surely by now we are visiting the nearest star, no? It's incredible to me how many people honestly believe they can predict the future, when the future is so clearly unpredictable. Even while you acknowledge that everyone's predictions were too optimistic, in the very same sentence you insist on an optimistic pred…

I didn't make any prediction at all.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#129

Post by philwelch »

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…

When you buy car insurance, you're insuring the car for its market value, not for its sentimental value to you personally.

Re: The rise of the disposable car

#130

Post by [deleted] »

magicalhippo wrote: post #116
throwaway48476 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern cars aren't designed to be easy to work on which really inflates the labor hours required for even trivial issues.

The my front left indicator light went on my BMW i3. Tried looking up the specs for the bulb to buy a new one. Of course it wasn't that simple. Oh boy was I naive. No, it required a whole new headlight assembly, $800 plus labor. Funnily enough, the car got totalled shortly after, before I had decided to go ahead with the repair. Someone hit my SO as she was in a roundabout, and the impact moved the car several meters…

[deleted]
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