This pattern is more of the norm than not for expensive high-tech cars. Rich people like nice stuff and are willing to pay maintenance and repair bills.
But, call 'em whatever you want. My point was, the demographic who buy new cars which compete in a luxury-priced segment are a demographic who are motivated by the technology of the product rather than value/price/maintenance.
Check your local car prices, b/c that is not really that expensive and certainly nowhere close to "rich" territory.
A fully loaded F-150 is $78k. I would be shocked if you also said anyone driving an F-150 is by definition rich.
Also, a cheap used car may be drastically less expensive to buy for most people, but they will ultimately pay thousands of dollars of maintenance, part replacements, fluid changes and gas which a Tesla really never has to deal with, ever. No one seems to talk about this.
Someone driving a fully loaded new one has to be pretty comfortably upper middle class to rich.
And also a fully loaded F150 buyer is culturally a different market segment than a Model 3 buyer. There's no real comparison between them.
I know people like this.
I also saw a statistic that something like 45% of Americans couldn't immediately come up with $1000 for an emergency the same day. Just in case we need a benchmark measure of relative wealth and prosperity between the typical six figure FAANG employee and people working jobs that pay a great deal less.
somebody might sell you a mostly okay running older BMW 7 series for $4500, fully loaded with all the options but take a look at the parts and labor cost to fix something on it.... you might as well throw away the whole car.
E.g, in 2011 paid $16,000 for a 2003 E320 wagon in perfect condition. It was $70,000 brand new, so the original depreciation is eye-watering. Since then I’ve probably put $2,000/year * 10 years into it, so less than half the depreciation. It’s still functionally new, with a fair share of small aesthetic issues.
I once bought a car with negative value, in that I spent more on deferred maintenance in the first month than I paid for it. That was a magnificent vehicle, though, once I fixed it up; identical to this — https://bringatrailer.com/listing/1987-mercedes-benz-300sdl-...
But in reality, I don't have the energy for dealing with this sort of thing. In fact, sometimes I have a bad dream that I bought some high-maintenance older car and am stuck with it.