Craigslist Cars EDA | Hacker News Reader

Craigslist Cars EDA

kaggle.com

31 pointsluu23 comments

“ Not sure what to make about the vehicles showing in the low price area of 2020,”

Advertised down payment needed for loan interpreted as price.

or monthly financing/lease payment.

Many will put $0, $1 or no price to try to get in to the most search results.

This is very good visualization but I'm very surprised by how the author didn't understand that the 2020 cars had their prices set by the monthly payment or by the down payment rather than the total price of the vehicle, since all of the postings would be by dealerships.

Based on price versus odometer, it seems to me that the smart play is to buy a car with about 80 or 90 thousand miles on it, put another 20 thousand on it, and then sell for about the same price you paid. The buyer of a lower mileage vehicle pays a premium, while the buyer of a higher mileage vehicle has the experience of driving an older car with about the same ability to resell it later.

Right, but you also have to consider that repair cost per mile will go up with cumulative mileage. A car with lower mileage will, on average, cost less in repairs, and spend less time in the shop.

Right, that's the reason to avoid buying over 100k - 100k seems to be about where the curves converge, so there's no depreciation reduction benefit to buying something with over 100k miles versus something with under 100k miles, whereas if you buy something with under 100k miles you're on the hook for depreciation.

This is right, with a proviso that many good prices on regionally oversupply vehicles. Example: BMW 3-Series in Miami area.

Price Distribution by Year -- this is an interesting one. Looks like eventually there isn't a huge variance in price. So brands with "good resale value" probably don't matter if you're keeping your car a really long time.

I'm curious where the CSVs came from. Does CL provide the bulk data? I know they're notoriously anti-spidering.

DC has the highest % of foreign cars being sold. Idle speculation: I wonder if some foreign embassies mandate buying their national car brands, and if they sell their cars quite often to keep their fleet shiny new...

I propose a simpler solution.

DC is stupid wealthy.

And we all know wealthy suburbanites love their Toyotas and Hondas (and respective luxury brands) and wouldn't be caught dead driving an Impala let alone a <clutches pearls> Cadillac. So that's what the market gets saturated with.

Oh, yes. A drive around the Northern Virginia suburbs very quickly confirms this.

Interesting how in the south the wealthy like to drive Suburbans. Perhaps in DC there is a bigger percentage of progressive people who’d choose to drive a Prius?

How is foreign made even defined? Because there’s tons of Toyota and Honda made in the US, and Ford and Chevy made in Mexico.

And do they classify Chrysler as domestic or foreign (part of FCA)?

Your speculation is poor - since there are 193+ countries and the imports from foreign countries is roughly 6 that are road legal by NHTSA. Germany - Japan - Italy - Sweden - South Korea - England.

Foreign cars that are not produced under approved brands from these countries would be classed as grey market and are subject to import laws, that would likely make your proposed mandate impractical.

Also the number of foreign diplomats in DC's ~690,000 population is unlikely to skew the numbers.

I think it might just be a way for staff at embassies to make some money on the side. Embassy employees are allowed to import vehicles without paying import duties or taxes.

Buying a car every month or two and reselling it to auto dealers could provide a reasonable profit.

A few years ago, tariffs accounted for 25% of a cars price for SUV's and Light-Duty Trucks from the EU. I'm not sure if it's changed since the new administration has started.

https://www.state.gov/about-us-diplomatic-importation-progra...

It's just that DC is the only jurisdiction there that is 100% urban/suburban. Most states have a mix of urban and rural areas and there are different buying preferences between them. If you plotted nearby cities as separate categories you'd probably see something similar. There are over 700,000 residents in DC so the effect of embassies is vanishingly small.

EDA is "Exploratory Data Analysis" ?

I mean, I see Electronic Design Automation when I see EDA, and pretty sure it's not that.

> EDA is "Exploratory Data Analysis" ?

Yes, it is.

Any idea what's up with the two peaks in the price of 10 cylinder cars?

Very few cars have 10 cylinders and (speculating) the end result just happens to be bimodal. Or bad data -- some scraped value is misinterpreted as indicating 10 cylinders. Three and five cylinder engines are not common either.

The V10 prices are going to be dominated by the Ford v10. Yes there's the Dodge v10 in some 20yo trucks and Vipers but for every one of those produced a stream of V10 E-series cab and chassis rolled off the production line.

One peak is likely trucks and the other is likely vans. Trucks tend to go for more than vans because they tend to have 4wd, more appeal to people who care about image and a wider variety of job specific bodies on them. Or at least that's my (experience based) theory.

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