Why? It's quite likely they don't own the cars outright. People were encouraged to take our car loans and have repayments to make, and the US has constructed its cities in such a way that cars are essential.
And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.
I agree with you, but the problem is that the bankers aren’t telling this to people and have become over-reliant on subprime consumer debt like this. Uber launched a lease-to-buy program for their drivers so they could nicer cars on the road and then didn’t uphold their promise to attract more riders to Uber Black. Consumers are getting preyed upon so hard in the US and we act like it’s just business and poor people are dumb for a reason.
> And you can live without a car, it is about structuring your life better.
This is such an invalid statement for most Americans, and it’s deeply condescending to boot. There’s simply no viable alternative to car ownership for most Americans, period. If you have (or had) a job that required any sort of commute and you don’t live in a handful of cities with first class public transit (which are pretty much all in the northeast), you could spend up to 2-3 hours commuting each way every day using public transit. That’s just a non-starter for most. Even tech cities like Austin and SF have poor transit options compared to Europe.
A lot of people were being made fun of for not taking 0% loans in order to purchase cars: "it's free money!", they were told, "you'd be stupid not to take free money". It turns out those 0% loans had other hidden costs that many people were not aware of (like the costs of you not being able to service debt once your revenues go to zero).
While that's certainly holds true for some metro areas, it's certainly not a rule for sprawling US cities built for cars. Opting out of car ownership limits your employment options, social mobility, and so on.
Many Americans make awful decisions around their cars. We had this thread five months ago:
Borrowers Are Going Underwater on Car Loans (wsj.com)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21505748Most people do not have the money to purchase a car outright, even the cheap several thousand dollar ones.
Therefore they rent or lease, and hope this specific scenario never happens.
and get this: they clean them too.