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Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

economist.com

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Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#751

Post by pixl97 »

intrasight wrote: post #401
taylodl wrote: post #287

The young are falling out of love with cars because they're unaffordable. It's as simple as that. It's yet another sign the standard of living is declining for the young. The average new car price in the U.S. is now over $47K (Consumer Reports). I make a good living and I'm not going to pay that kind of money for a new car! A young person would be stupid to pay that kind of money for a car. Okay, so what about used c…

As a "Generation X" near the Boomer boundary, I just can't stop being shocked by "average car is $47k". When I was a teen, my parents did rental investing, owned about a dozen properties, and had never paid more than $30k for a property. I'm a well-compensated tech worker, and have no shame in driving my 2004 Volvo that I bought used 16 years ago. Had a second car for a while. A 2005 Camry that I bought for $5000 in…

As someone from the same timeframe you're missing a number of things that have happened.

Safety/pollution laws have made small cheap cars non-existent. You cannot buy anything like those 2004/2005 cars on the market today, the cheapest featureless models have mostly disappeared.

Seemingly while building the digital world that we both live in, you are missing the ramifications of the monster you created. Before the digital days I bought and sold a number of underpriced items effectively doing difficult in person arbitrage. If I wa willing to find things like cars cheap, I could make money buying them and selling them to/at dealers for more. You and I have effectively destroyed that market. Sellers of those items now can effectively make far more by understanding how much their car is worth and selling it direct to market. And, in the cases where the seller is underpriced, digital buyers monitoring the market quickly and efficiently buy up these underpriced items. This is true true for almost any investment item, there is really far more money than good investments these days which leads a huge portion of investment to be pure luck.

Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#752

Post by pixl97 »

intrasight wrote: post #581
zeku wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most would love to, but the rent is too high and they need a car to be able to get to their job so they can tread water. Owning a primary home as a means of "lazy wealth generation" is only accessible to people with family money or career titles like "Software Engineer" and even then the homes are much lower standard than before for older people working the same job.

Everything you said just further supports my statement of "save your money". Buy a cheap used car (but cheap over 5+ years, so get a reliable one). Rent a cheap apartment (mine is $1100/mo and is very nice).

Boomers: We need young people to save their money, they are investing unwisely.

[Zoomers stop spending money]

economy collapses, boomers investments go negative

Boomer: No, not like that!

And, yea, I know you're Gen-X from your other post, but you're talking like a Boomer at this point.

Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#753

Post by Spooky23 »

BizarreByte wrote: post #80
Spooky23 wrote: post #8

Cars are falling out of love with them. How is one expected to pay for a $1500/mo apartment and a $40k car on a $60k salary?

You don’t have to spend 40k on a car. My Toyota was 22k overall and the monthly payments are very manageable. You can still get new cars for under 20k and good used cars for much less.

When I graduated from college in 2000 I bought a 1993 Pontiac Bonneville with low miles for $6000 or $10000 2022 dollars.

Today, you’re looking at 10-15 year old cars at that price range. Reality is a decent used car from a condition perspective is about $15k.

Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#754

Post by earthling8118 »

shortcake27 wrote: post #692
prophesi wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention that if you do decide on an old and affordable car, it's offset by the price of its constant repairs and the anxiety that it could break down again at any moment.

You just need to do your research first. I recently bought a 2001 Corolla with 200k miles. I felt confident because it has a timing chain, no belt to snap. Manual transmission which is bulletproof, just needs a new clutch every now and then. And it’s a a common car so it’s easy and cheap to find spare parts. This era is probably the sweet spot for reliable cars. Post 2010 cars have gotten extremely complicated both m…

What kind of research could you possibly do that will help resolve this? And even if you can is everyone supposed to buy those cars? This only scales for a small amount of peolle.

I've exclusively owned vehicles from the time period. They've all been around 120k miles when I got them. They aren't any more reliable than any others. They've all had issues that caused me problems. Some of them have even been incredibly difficult to diagnose. I've never put more than about 10k miles on any of them. In part because I couldn't trust them to get my home

Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#755

Post by detourdog »

earthling8118 wrote: post #740
detourdog wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have reached out to manufacturers that offer the ability to pay a fixed amount for access to cars. Last I checked they were all individual focused products. Zipcar could work but I find the more relationships I have the more paperwork. I would control all aspects and simply add it to the keycard for tracking. If I introduce a third party it removes human judgement from the individuals involved in the relationship.…

You sound like the kind of fabled landlord that is a pleasure to work with. Keep it up.

The biggest problem I see with the modern world is that too many relationships are working at the wrong scale, or are asymmetrical.

Anyone looking for a mixed-use studio apartment with a fiber line get in touch. If you like to walk in the woods and internet access this is a great building.

We are practically net-zero and survived that -15 F cold snap on heat pumps.

view.cogs.com

Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#756

Post by BizarreByte »

jjav wrote: post #508
maxsilver wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but even then, I don't get the emotional association of freedom that previous generations did. I don't know what's different, although I have some guesses. Money, I'm sure, but there's something that's nagging me about it. I'd argue it's a combination of money and aging infrastructure. Money is the big one (cars used to be a lot cheaper, both to buy and to maintain. Incomes for most used to be much higher). Infrast…

> Money is the big one (cars used to be a lot cheaper, both to buy and to maintain. That's just not true. Maybe for some outlier car models. For example my parents bought a base model Toyota Corolla in 1998 for 16K. A 2023 Corolla has MSRP $21,550. 16K in 1998 dollars is $29,366 today. So, the Corolla has actually become substantially cheaper over the years!

Cheaper, more reliable, more efficient, and they have way more features today.

It’s shocking how much cars have improved in only a few decades.

Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#757

Post by mariosisters »

tablespoon wrote: post #733
pavlov wrote: post #565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driving is not like being at home because it requires active focus and continuous observation of an evolving social situation where other people’s decisions could cost lives. If sitting on a train is like being in a hostel, then driving is like doing tedious office work in a cubicle. I’d rather hang out at the hostel.

> Driving is not like being at home because it requires active focus and continuous observation of an evolving social situation where other people’s decisions could cost lives. You're unreasonably expecting the analogy to be a perfect map between the two situations, when no analogy ever is. My car is more home-like than a bus, because the car is my space .

Right on. I have a van I built out for camping, I cart the kids around in it all the time exactly because it’s basically a second home! Everything we need all the time. A place to chill out / wait out a melt down, change a diaper, have a bite to eat.

Even a Honda Civic can accommodate these things far better than a bus.

As you say, it’s our space.

Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#758

Post by inglor_cz »

I mostly use public transport, but I have a taxi budget (about 10 per cent of what my acquaintances pay for their cars yearly in toto) and I will use it for transporting anything heavy, very inconvenient weather or for necessary, but otherwise impractical connections.

I like this combination and I am glad that taxis exist. Some errands would be really weird-to-impossible without the ability to use a car, even if it is driven by somebody else.

Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#759

Post by lp0_on_fire »

wizofaus wrote: post #709
lp0_on_fire wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people think that "because I'm on a motorcycle" or "because I'm on a bike" or "because I'm a pedestrian" they're magically granted some special protection from morons on the road and the laws of physics. Sure, "the law" says you might have the "right of way" but does that really matter when some idiot in a 2 ton truck runs you over because he was looking at his phone? I was a rider until I got in an accident (in…

By that argument you should never cross a road as a pedestrian... FWIW I do agree, the safety aspect is by far the biggest downside of motorcycles/bikes. But there's plenty that can be done to make both a lot safer, and examples of countries that have pulled it off successfully. And once you have a significant fraction of people no longer using cars, roads tend to become safer for everyone.

Obviously one has to cross the road as a pedestrian sometimes but if I'm being honest in many places around where I live in the US I go out of my way to not. Stroads plus the lack of sidewalks, guarded crosswalks and blind corners make it so that it's dumb to cross in many places.

Even guarded crosswalks are hit or miss (no pun intended). The lights are all timed for vehicles and most drivers around here think stop lights are more of a suggestion than a rule. I've lost count the number of times I've almost been hit crossing the street by a person trying to turn left before the light changes.

Having grown up in a much smaller town where we walked/rode our bikes everywhere it's jarring.

Re: Throughout the rich world, the young are falling out of love with cars

#760

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

Insanity wrote: post #514
usrusr wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really is a "the grass is bleaker on the other side" situation. As a public transport person I feel weirdly constrained by the idea that a day's itinerary will inevitably have to see me return to wherever the car is parked, impossible to do spontaneous things like walk a few stops, ride with an acquaintance or something like that that would eventually take me home, but not return to some previous stage. With a car…

I used public transportation (and cycling) throughout most of my twenties and only got my own car in my thirties. Public transport only works when you live in an urban area with good connections. Where I used to live, public transport was often delayed, or on strike. During winter it was annoying to have to wait in the cold for a bus or train that had 30+ minutes delay. And during rush hour the train and bus were so…

> Public transport only works when you live in an urban area with good connections.

It also works when you live in a rural area with good connections.

(I live in one such. I was going to say “I’m lucky enough to live in one such” but there’s no luck involved: I chose this place because of it.)

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