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Comment by shliachtx | Hacker News Reader

How many people do you know with 20 year old 2000-2017 cars?

None, as that year range is less than 20 years.

Honestly, the issue there is that the car market pushed people further towards buying a new car on a loan and then trading it in every few years, or leases. Nobody expects to be driving the same car for the next 20 years, and loans are easy enough to get that few people who're doing reasonably ok with money are "forced" to get a used car.

I did not think of this until reading this thread, but the practice of leasing may be driving the longevity of modern cars, which is in stark contrast to what is happening with domestic appliances. Somewhat paradoxically, the leasing model seems to benefit from a robust used-car market.

Without leases, I'm not sure that there would actually be any supply for the used car market. There are some small percentage of people that buy and sell new cars every two years, but most people I've seen buy cars and drive them into the ground until they hit a major, expensive mechanical repair or couldn't get them to pass inspection any longer.

Most used cars I've looked at in dealerships (as opposed to the Craigslist/Uncle Henry's as-is-where-is private sales) were overwhelmingly former lease vehicles.

Precisely - it is a problem for the industry if it cannot easily sell formerly-leased cars at prices well above what a clunker would fetch.

None, since that range would make that impossible, but I have ~170k miles on one of mine at the moment with few issues.

It replaced a car that had 190k miles from around 2000. Its worst problems were a bad A/C compressor (replaced at ~100k miles) and a slipping clutch (it was the original clutch). The plugs and wires were replaced once during its service.

Modern cars are amazingly reliable and amazingly safe compared to their predecessors.

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