$25k ?!
The last car I bought cost just less than $12k USD new ( on the road including all taxes and fees) around 5 years ago.
I know inflation's been high, but not it's not been that high.
The $25k car is going extinct?
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: The $25k car is going extinct?
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depends on the man, I’ll admit in my early twenties I meet a few partners by being car free. I legit took a girl home after I asked her if she knew why the train was late. In Amsterdam at least one of the train stations has a piano. It becomes a 3rd place were people can make friends and socialize. We don’t have many 3rd places in the US where you can exist without spending money.
Do you have example of places with density similar to US where public transport works well? Australia has some in urban centres, but otherwise car centric. Same in NZ. Elecric bus to my place costs 8x more than driving EV (before it was taxed)
The density issue isn't country wide, but about metro areas. See Spain: If you look at the entire country and divide by population, it looks like the one of the least dense countries in Europe. But what if instead we look at where people live? Get the population density of the square kilometer where each person lives, and divide by number of people, so completely empty space doesn't count for anything. Then you see Spaniards live in areas denser than Liechtenstein. And guess what? Spain has top notch public transport, including high speed rail, because every endpoint is dense. I am right now sitting in a town, population around 100k, with higher population density than New York's Upper East side. We don't even have that much public transport, because only the elderly and the disabled need it, given that I can be on any given edge of town by walking 2 kms. In your typical US suburb, that gets you nowhere.
So it's not country density, but population center density. Single family homes with yards and individual garages make public transport pretty bad, as the catchment rates of each stop just don't have enough people. Just put the people closer together, and have more farmland/forest around the town.
Re: The $25k car is going extinct?
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, if you kill someone in a traffic accident, you feel shit the rest of your life.
The main point here is that it sounds a lot like a zero sum game, people are struggling to catch a bigger share of a limited "safety" pie while manufacturers instigating the mass war are watching their profits increase. It's not clear at all to me how a crash involving two SUVs is much safer than, say, a 2 bike crash, and in fact there is a particular type of accident (front-overs of children) than trucks are strongl…
The situation reminds of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Re: The $25k car is going extinct?
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
Houses do not increase in value. Land property does (usually). Houses decrease.
Depends. My (UK) house is 125 years old. Its depreciating days are well behind it.
How can a house stop depreciating if every part of it and everything in it becomes older as time passes?
The only thing stopping depreciation is regular maintenance which costs money.
Re: The $25k car is going extinct?
#415Earlier quoted context omitted.
Small cars are disappearing in the EU as well. E.g. Audi will discontinue (or have already discontinued) their A1 model (and it was the perfect little car).
VAG cars are weird, I've had both an Audi A1 and a VW Up (short lease for work); they are basically the same car, both had a 3 cylinder, 1 liter engine, similar interiors, etc. But the A1 had the sports look package and generally a fancier feel to it. But VAG uses the same base for a lot of models and brands (VW, Audi, Skoda, SEAT); quality wise there's not much difference between them, but price wise they are, with…
The Cayenne is a Touareg with Porsche bits and special options. Particularly the rear doors of the second gen of both models are interchangeable.
Re: The $25k car is going extinct?
#416Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is true. On the other hand, if you get killed in a car accident... You also feel shit the rest of your life.
But at least you didn't waste $ on a big car.
If you had spent it, you might still be alive, and if you aren't, it's hardly wasted, since you no longer need it.
Jokes aside, I live in the UK, and occasionality I see vehicles here that are entirely too big and unnecessary for our roads.
There was a lady driving what I think was a Defender 130 (I don't know modern LRs too well), it was far too big for the parking spaces in the tiny car park we were in, she could only just see over the steering wheel, and she had no chance of seeing my 5yo child I was walking back to my car with; who's quite tall for 5 but didn't reach over the height of the bonnet.
Re: The $25k car is going extinct?
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a shame people run them into the ground. If looked after and a bit of money (not a lot of money) spent they would work well for another decade or two.
Its more expensive with the cost of labour in the UK to keep a car going, especially once it starts needing welding. We apply a lot of salt to the roads in the winter so after 20 years most cars will need welding work. Second hand cars are also cheaper in the UK compared to other countries because we're right hand drive so there aren't as many markets that they can be exported to second hand.
I live in the UK. Cars aren't that cheap (at least for something half decent), labour costs are dependant on what is being done. While the roads do get salted, rust is more dependant on the vehicle model. Also there are preventative measures you can take that aren't that expensive again rust.
Re: The $25k car is going extinct?
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because a big part of owning a vehicle is summer roadtrips, ski vacations, visiting family, moving stuff. An SUV is simply more convenient. I've also found road maintenance is getting worse where I live, it's almost necessary having an SUV or truck just to navigate the suburbs. Also the (semi) compact crossover has kind of killed the compact car. You get more space, better ground clearance, for a decent price.
> I've also found road maintenance is getting worse where I live Well, bigger cars are a factor that makes the roads degrade faster.
I think that's more relevant with really large vehicles. An SUV is generally somewhere in the range of 1.5-3 tons whereas a loaded semi truck can weigh up to 40 tons. If a road is designed to handle 40 ton vehicles then i have a hard time believing that 2-3 ton vehicles make much of a difference compared to a 1.5 ton vehicle.
A semi truck with a trailer will distribute those 40 tons over a larger area due to more and larger tires, but I am assuming that it still impacts a larger ground pressure on the road than a personal car - at least when loaded.
Re: The $25k car is going extinct?
#419Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a big part of it for you perhaps, but not for everyone?
IME it's a big part of it for a lot of people. People don't buy a car for what they do with it every day, they buy it for what they do with it a few times a year. If you have a boat on a trailer, you buy a vehicle that can pull the trailer. If you drive to the mountains in winter a few times a year, you buy a higher clearance AWD vehicle so that you can skip chain control. You might say that this irrational and that…
In addition, renting a large car for a few days is really expensive. If you have to do this 5-10 times a year, over 10 years of ownership, I'm not so sure that buying small and renting large make sense financially. Not to mention the inconvenience and loss of flexibility from having to collect and drop off a rental car, which typically isn't exactly right around the corner, especially in rural areas.
Re: The $25k car is going extinct?
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its more expensive with the cost of labour in the UK to keep a car going, especially once it starts needing welding. We apply a lot of salt to the roads in the winter so after 20 years most cars will need welding work. Second hand cars are also cheaper in the UK compared to other countries because we're right hand drive so there aren't as many markets that they can be exported to second hand.
I live in the UK. Cars aren't that cheap (at least for something half decent), labour costs are dependant on what is being done. While the roads do get salted, rust is more dependant on the vehicle model. Also there are preventative measures you can take that aren't that expensive again rust.
I found this video informative about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjMyx24pxTo
He's a second hand car dealer in Stockport and has experience of selling cars in Spain and in California.