Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by offtop5 | Hacker News Reader

The part about cars is pretty spot on, I'm upper middle class and I've been able to save so much money by getting rid of my car. On the low end you're going to hit 300 to 500 dollars a month for the privilege of driving.

The problem here is America simply isn't built for public transit. But since cars are a status symbol, people still go down to Toyota, or Honda and as long as they can make that first down payment they get to drive a new car. I was talking to a rather brash car salesman and he laughed about how he can tell who's going to get their car repoed.

Cars are the single biggest reason why so many people can't get ahead. You also have a gargantuan maze of cascading consequences when you really can't afford a car. You don't have insurance because you can't afford it, you get in an accident and lose your license. As the article states that doesn't stop you from needing to drive. Then you get pulled over and risk getting arrested.

I'm very lucky in that I don't need to drive a car, even when you can afford one driving to work every day can be a truly hellish experience.

>> I'm upper middle class and I've been able to save so much money by getting rid of my car.

Because you probably have job at a desk with a computer. You don't physically do much and so your per-minute presence at work isn't mandatory. If you are a few minutes late the world is not going to end and your workday rarely starts before 5am. You can handle the ins and outs of public transportation and/or you can afford to live close enough to walk/bike. I have a job that, while it pays well enough I have to be physically present (military, long story). While I am paid well enough I will get into real trouble if I am not on time every day. Sometimes I'm on call and have to get to work within 30-minutes of receiving a phonecall. I'd like to ditch the car, but I don't see any other reliable 24/7/365 transpiration options. Some of the people who work under me, and earn considerably less, are lobbying for "have own car" and "have own cellphone" to be listed work requirements. That might make at least some associated costs tax deductible.

Actually in my area public transportation is more reliable than driving.

Nothing like being able to play video games during your commute

The video game thing is interesting. If we one day get truly autodrive cars, would a long commute matter as much? If I can literally sleep as the computer does the driving I probably wouldn't care so much about a longer commute.

Wear and tear on the car would be an issue, even if you presume Tesla's can effectively drive themselves for free, Tesla still break down. I don't think I'd be okay with anything over an hour each way

I'm really curious to see what the longevity of future electric cars ends up looking like. In theory electric motors should be able to last way longer than an ICE, and most other wear parts (suspension, breaks, etc) should be straight forward to replace.

The big question would be batteries, and in the case of Tesla at least right to repair issues.

>> In theory electric motors should be able to last way longer than an ICE

Except that it is very rare for a car to be scrapped because of its engine. IC engines are mature tech. They last forever, longer than the body of the car. Extending the life of the engine further won't extend the life of the vehicle. And for such calculations one must include the battery packs. I think it safe to say that while electric motors might marginally outlast IC engines, I don't think that batteries will every have a functional lifespan longer than a gas tank (many decades, maybe even a century.)

This might narrowly be true if your definition of engine excludes other ICE-only components like the transmission or radiator (which is technically correct in specialist discussion but not general usage). The most common non-crash explanation I’ve heard people cite for turning cars into write-offs with is a blown head gasket, so I’m not sure about your thesis in general, and it’s certainly not something an electric car owner needs to worry about along with a slew of other cost/complexity increases specific to ICEs.

>> a blown head gasket

That's a one/two-hour job, a thousand dollars at most. I don't think they are selling the car because the engine is bad rather that the car is now worth more in parts than as a complete object. The engine isn't dead, just in need of repair. This happens to electric drivetrains too. Windings break. Bolts shear. Bearings fail. And many/most electric cars (tesla) still have transmission-type things between their motors and wheels.

1-2 hours if it doesn’t cause heat damage - maybe my relatives have been unlucky but a couple had warping from explosive failures.

(Disclaimer: I’m a software guy, might be misremembering – the key point was that basically all of the times I’ve heard someone mention involuntarily getting rid of a car it was either an accident or something which does not affect BEVs.)

Exactly. Cars get scrapped because the part costs $W, you can't run a compliant business for less than $X, the tech needs to be paid $Y, the service manual subscriptions cost $Z and they all add up to a number greater than what a 2002 Cavalier is worth.

An under the table side gig mechanic can perform many more jobs in an economically viable manner because the fixed costs are so much less.

I think the rest of their post after the part you quoted agrees with your point. So much of the US was designed or redesigned to only work for people who own cars but we still love to talk about them as if they were voluntary expenses ignoring the number of people who are one breakdown or accident away from unemployment & lack of access to healthcare.

What city has public transit that will get you safely and quickly to work at 3AM? What city design will still accomplish all that after your job relocates 15 miles further away?

That was kind of my point: switching to suburban living, heavily subsidizing roads and parking but not having effective transit (or only having it for, say, tourists and sports venues rather than something a commuter could rely on), etc. are all choices which were repeatedly made by planners. We can make other choices and, especially now, climate change is likely to force us to consider at least some of them since even an electric car has a significant lifetime carbon emission contribution disadvantage due to the inherent spatial inefficiency of the medium.

Not with public transport, but in my (Dutch) city I can get everywhere, safely, within a reasonable amount of time, at all times of the day, by bike. From one end to the other wouldn't be exactly 15 minutes, but it would be under 30. With an electronic bike you can probably make that 20 minutes.

What about a motorcycle? Cheaper and insurance not required.

Motorcycle can't carry kids (in the US) safely, or other needs like groceries. And yes, insurance is still required.

Also, you can use special lanes and in California lane split. If you're willing to take on the risk, and live in a sunny place, motorcycles can compete with public transport in cost.

I don't have much confidence in most people being able to drive a car. While motorcycles do look really cool, it's just not something most people can safely do

The proliferation of moped-like vehicles that exist right below the "everything beyond here is legally a motorcycle and the state makes you obtain an extra license and insure it like a car thereby providing a massive dis-incentive to not just get a car" line seems to indicate plenty of people are fine with the risks.

Fine might not be the right term: there definitely are people okay with the risk, especially given how much faster they’ll get to their destination, but given how much more expensive cars are there’s also a financial push to take a possible risk over certain financial stress.

>> ... insurance not required.

Where exactly is insurance not required for a motorcycle? Or do you mean moped? And it was -12c with two inches of snow on my car this morning. Anything on two wheels would be lethal. Good luck even riding a bicycle with two inches of new snow over a season's worth of compact ice.

I thought for my state there was no need for insurance, but turns out in 2019 they started requiring it. Seattle rarely gets snow so I didn't think about weather conditions.

I think a motorcycle couldn't work for your case, but some sort of one or two person on road / off road vehicle would still be cheaper than buying a car.

In my experience, motorcycle insurance will be about a 20% the cost of car insurance, so it's still a lot cheaper.

70 mpg is also pretty nice.

I prefer to keep my insides on the inside.

I used to take public transportation that took 2 hours each way to get to my job. Then I bought my first car for $500. It was such great freedom.

Then, years later, I moved to the city and was able to get rid of my car. It was great freedom.

Then, years later, I got married and had a child. We bought and owned two cars. It was great freedom.

I can kind of relate to it however in my opinion being able to solely rely on public transportation in the city is still the best kind of freedom.

> On the low end you're going to hit 300 to 500 dollars a month for the privilege of driving.

How is maintaining a car costing you so much?

$100 / month on gas, $200 / month for a car payment, $100 / month for insurance. That's not even accounting for maintenance.

$1200 a year insurance? Seems a huge amount! Is this one of those things where it's for some reason more expensive for poor people?

It's more expensive for people who haven't been continuously insured, who have had accidents, or who otherwise have a poor driving record. That's a larger fraction of poor people than it is of not-poor people, so yes, typically insurance is more expensive for poor people.

Say it's half that or you drive uninsured. A car is still a big expense.

You think $100/mo for car insurance is expensive? The average car insurance rate is apparently $133, but I personally know it's not very hard to hit more than $100 (even on an older model car) if you want more than liability.

https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/insurance/car-insurance-basi...

> You think $100/mo for car insurance is expensive?

Definitely! Mine is $500/year for full coverage in the UK.

I'm nearly 40 and have been driving for decades. I recently downgraded to liability and it's still $55/mo for myself and my similarly aged significant other.

In my experience in the US, the cost of even essential coverage varies dramatically by zip code. For example, when I moved 1 mile from Cleveland Heights to Piedmont Ave in Oakland, CA, my rates went down by more than 20%.

So yea, significantly more expensive for poor people.

Liability-only insurance with minimum coverage for a good driver with a single car would be only $300-$400/year in my area. $1,200 is if you have collision and comprehensive

The cost varies dramatically from area to area though because each neighborhood has different loss risk, each state (and some locales) has different rules for underwriting, and different minimums for coverage.

Gas and insurance alone can easily hit 300 of you drive enough. Say you keep it at 200, 100$ a month to fix minor things isn't unreasonable. But that assumes you bought a car cash, from my experience people tend to finance cars just because they can't get three or four thousand dollars together at one time. Then you're paying $400 a month

Middle class perspective: if you can buy a car for cash, but you can get a good interest rate on a loan, you may be better off taking the loan. The opportunity cost of having cash sunk into the car can be greater than your financing costs.

A basic, simple loan like this also is often good for your credit record.

Unless your credit score is absolutely perfect, the APR on a used car loan is easily 8-10%

That's a pretty big chunk of change to spend to boost your credit record

https://www.bankrate.com/loans/auto-loans/rates/

Right I was thinking about new car loans which I've seen at zero, which is why it makes sense to work the money somewhere else.

Yeah, that's another way it costs to be poor. But you can read that page as "a new car loan can be as low as 4.2%, even if you only have fair-to-good credit".

It can still make sense to hang on to the cash if you don't otherwise have a cash reserve.

The problem is most people buy more car than they can afford when they finance it. If I have to save $10,000, and I have it in my mind that I don't buy things on credit, I'm only going to buy a $10,000 car. But if I have $1,000 for a down payment and the car dealership talks me into a $30,000 car with zero down, I might take that deal.

True, but a complementary problem is that your $10000 used car is probably overpriced, driven up by the demand for lower-cost-up-front cars. Edmunds' 5-year TCO on a 2015 Corolla is only about $20/month less than that of a 2021 Corolla. There have been years where their estimate was for slightly higher TCO on the five-year-old car.

Add the numbers up and it's pretty hard to get TCO on a car driven 15,000 miles/year in the US much below about $3500/year, even if you do as much work as possible yourself, buy junkyard parts, etc. If you're capable of getting that number down very much, you're probably capable of making enough money that you don't have to.

TCO on a decent and highly reliable new compact, for comparison, is about $5000-$6000/year. (Check Edmunds) At $400-$500/month in TCO you should have no car worries. But if you don't have that extra $100+/month, or can't get into a new or certified used car for whatever reason, that does you no good.

Having been raised to be frugal, and having been broke, I totally sympathize with the car trouble thing. That said, a lot of people make irrational decisions about cars, and that can include trying to be frugal.

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