‘I can’t move my car’: Americans struggle as vehicle expenses rise
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Back when I lived in LA, I literally had a car salesman try to tell me I should be okay with an outrageous interest rate, because everyone can just refinance later.
There is an intense amount of pressure to not only own a car, but to buy a nice car so you can show off. For one, you're not going to attract quality people like that, and two the moment things go bad you'll lose that car.
I was able to reduce my monthly expenses by about 20% just by going car free, and I refuse to ever own a car again.
Owning a car is just this giant liability, but of course I'm rather limited in where I can live because of that. Much of America is just broken, there's no way to fix poverty as cars will keep you poor. You have a tiny handful of cities which both have decent public transit and are moderately affordable. One of these cities starts with a C.
The one guy who moves heaven and earth to live in a "good neighborhood" that's normally a tad much for his income would get accolades around here. The guy who lives in a trailer park but and expends the same effort to drive a nice car gets derided. I don't see the big difference between them. They're both just going "all in" in different aspects of their lives.
Then sell a car 10 years after you buy it.
One goes up in value, often greatly, the other is nearly worthless.
The Toyota fanboys would take issue with that statement ;)
Personally owning and maintaining my own metal box on wheels saves me ~2hr per day over the publicly owned metal box on wheels. Even in Europe that would be worth it for just about any white collar professional.
Not everything has to be a good investment.
I drive junk but I understand why some people would rather sit in a really, really nice car for their commute. The way I see it transportation is just the cost of having a job. "Base" transportation has zero residual value. You can't sell a worn out shitbox for anything. You also can't sell a city bus or rail car at all. If you throw more money on top of the "base" A to B car in order to have something nice then you might get some value back but it's fundamentally a luxury expense. For my use case and for many people, the "base" car offers so much utility improvement over anything else that it's a) a no brainier b) basically pays for itself vs attaining equivalent standard of living without it.
Not everything should be viewed as a financial instrument only.
Say a musician buys a trumpet, and 20 years later that trumpet has depreciated. The argument could be made that if he bought a house instead of a trumpet it would have been a much better investment. But how would he have played the trumpet his whole life then?
Technically the house goes down in value as well. The one that goes up in value is the land, not the house.
Which is weird, because (until last year anyway, when used car pricing went crazy) cars were by-far the cheapest major expense an average American has. Most Americans drive, in large part because the car is free money -- the drastic housing savings and occupational/educational/commercial opportunities more than make up for the small amount of cash it costs to own and operate one.
Just on rent savings alone, my car pays me to drive it. (The car costs me about $400/month in full TCO, but that car easily saves me $800/month or more just on rent alone, not to mention trips or kids school runs or visiting friends or shopping or so on). And that's not even factoring in that people's time has value, and any alternative form of transit easily double-to-triples the amount of time a given trip takes.
> I was able to reduce my monthly expenses by about 20% just by going car free, and I refuse to ever own a car again.
That sounds nice, and maybe it's just the midwest in me, but I've never seen a person who can actually save money by not-owning a car. Many people claim as such, but then you dig a little and find out they were already wealthy to begin with, which is the only way they were able to get away with it.
(e.g., "you should totally sell your ~$20k car, and with the money you save, you could totally move your family into a $600k-more-expensive half-the-size downtown condo and go car-free. You can just pay a small $50/trip for an Uber whenever you really need that car" -- like, it sounds nice, but the math here doesn't check out at all).
The tradeoff is definitely worth it.
Well, it checks out depending on the assumed return of the real estate vs. other investments.
Roads are not just funded by usage taxes like gas taxes and tolls, but also by general tax revenue.
"Aside from gas taxes and individuals’ expenditures for their own driving, U.S. households bear on average an additional burden of more than $1,100 per year in taxes and other costs imposed by driving." [1]
That means, if I don't drive, I'm still paying for the roads and other periphery costs as a taxpayer.
The second argument I'd make against cars enabling lower costs is the city planning argument. North America has basically ignored mid-density development in favor of a downtown core + sprawl formula, so if you don't want to own a car or if you want to drive your car less frequently you're limited to a very small portion of the housing market that mostly exists in high cost areas.
Building ordinances and zoning laws also contribute to this problem, with parking minimums for homes and businesses making car ownership a guarantee (i.e., if the parking lot is so huge that it's impossible to walk across you're going to drive).
Tokyo, for example, maintains a completely flat housing cost over time due to housing policies that encourage housing supply [2], and the Tokyo metropolitan area has much lower car ownership per family than the USA.
Finally, it's important to point out that the USA enjoys low gas prices through its currency being the main currency for oil transactions, its own massive quantity of domestic oil production, and rather influential foreign policy. Cars are cheap in the USA because it has the ability to make that choice, but at the same time that choice is relatively unnecessary and wasteful considering how the US is overwhelmingly urban and suburban (i.e., it has enough population density in the places most people live to support a less car-focused development pattern. Sure, people in rural areas need cars, but people in Secaucus, New Jersey need/have cars due to conscious city planning choices).
[1][PDF] https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Who%20Pays%20for...
Disclosure: USPIRG is generally biased against highway expansion according to Wikipedia.
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...
Cities often have a terrible public transit or pedestrian/bicycle experience because they were built for cars. The alternative is a completely different city and lifestyle.
Used cars in the US are cheap, and outside the rust belt are also perfectly fine.
I've owned something like a dozen used cars in my life, most cost very little to own and operate, some even made profit when I sold them after fixing something obvious like a rotten ground connection. Through those years I learned how to repair and maintain the things which are marketable in-demand skills ensuring I'll never be unable to earn money - quite the opposite of keeping me poor.
Don't blame cars for stupid people making stupid choices.
So... those who can't afford the ideal miss out on things? [obvious]
Someone who can't afford a new car saves 30% by buying a decade old one. Except that old car is less efficient so they're buying 5-10% more for gas than if they had a new car. If you need a loan, interest rates are higher for used cars. The tires are crappy so they're spending $500 to replace them. The car has 100,000 miles on it so parts are worn down. Maybe you get really unlucky, and get in an accident that would've been prevented by a blind spot monitor or a backup camera. Maybe you get in an accident that would've happened regardless, but the older car doesn't prevent injuries that a newer model would've protected you from.
And you've ignored the substantial cost of comprehensive insurance, required by the lien holder when you buy a car you can't afford using rented money.
Used cars have gone insane in pricing so your end up with similar annual costs for used as new.
At least if you buy new, you know pretty much about what you are getting. It might be better for most people to buy new but keep the car for 10 years (i.e. never sell it as a used car in the first place).
> Don't blame cars for stupid people making stupid choices.
That is incredibly judgmental (like saying "poor people are poor because they are stupid").
Except I'm referring to stupid people, not poor people. There's plenty of ostensibly not-poor people making these awful choices living beyond their means, effectively in the process of becoming poor or just anchoring themselves down on a treadmill of debt.
Obviously there's a lot of pressure to live beyond your means, welcome to life in USA. Automobiles are just one facet of this ubiquitous phenomenon. But it's entirely feasible and practical to own and operate cars on a budget in the USA, cars are not the problem.
The problem I've seen more of throughout my life is stupid and/or lazy people unwilling to even get their hands dirty because they refuse to accept they're not rich and can't afford the luxury of not keeping a set of oil-stained clothes.
I was basically stuck in a car lease, and I have left my car sitting for about a month or so, only needing to move it to avoid a street cleaning ticket.
Not everyone is comfortable working on a car, and if you don't know what you're doing, this is extremely dangerous. For example, let's say you're not aware to never only support a car with a jack, if your jack slips, that could be the end.
I wouldn't call someone stupid for not wanting to take the risk of their $1,000 estate sell find stalling in the middle of the highway.
Plus let's just say you're poor poor. When I was much younger, I understood I could not afford both car expenses and rent. Luckily I was in a relatively transit friendly part of Los Angeles. So my 80$ a month bus pass did just fine.
Even if someone just gives you a car for free, you're going to spend at least $300 a month between gas and insurance in most places. If your incomes only $2,000, that extra $220 is going to hurt
In a former life back in IL I taught my GF at the time how to drive stick in a $250 Mazda 323 before even registering or insuring the thing. She then proceeded to drive this car to/from work and around town for a year before the engine and trans literally fell out of it (rust belt). The income from the job she drove to far exceeded the cost of the car. She took some safety risk driving a rust bucket, but you have to make compromises when you're resource constrained.
When I relocated from IL to CA for work I did it in a $500 Ford Ranger. This vehicle served as the bootstrap of a major life relocation. Eventually its brake line burst (rust belt), but that was long after the relocation was over and I was sitting pretty with other CA rust-free used vehicles already, with the truck mostly sitting around for hauling things.
From where I'm sitting used cars are absolutely amazing tools and their exceptionally cheap widespread availability in the USA is a feature not a flaw. Take advantage of it, get over your fears of getting your hands dirty or suffering some injury - you're smart enough to do it. But it doesn't matter how smart you are if you panic and shy away from the unfamiliar.
https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/research/auto-lo...
This is more of a structural problem with how we set our cities up. There's no reason we shouldn't have quality public transportation, along with much denser cities. There's so much space just dedicated to parking, which could all be reallocated if we had better transit.
This doesn't even go into the needs of those medically unable to drive.
Then again, where is this magical place where you're finding cheap quality cars. I've only lived in expensive cities, so maybe I'm missing context
These weren't quality cars; they were rust-buckets, I thought that was made clear. You have to compromise when you lack money, there's no free lunch here.
> I've only lived in expensive cities, so maybe I'm missing context
Poor people living in expensive places are self-inflicting suffering, and ironically for this discussion acquiring a dirt cheap car they can comfortably sleep in ASAP and escaping the expensive city is arguably the best way out.
> The problem I've seen more of throughout my life is stupid and/or lazy people unwilling to even get their hands dirty because they refuse to accept they're not rich and can't afford the luxury of not keeping a set of oil-stained clothes.
Many people were never taught by their parents on how to do that and lack the resources to learn on their own. Many simply don't have the time to do their own car maintnence while shuttling off to various jobs and barely having enough energy at the end of the day to go to sleep. Does "stupid" mean lack of education? Does "lazy" mean lack of energy? Both of those terms I don't think are very useful here.
Stupid and/or lazy people exist in droves, this is painfully obvious. I don't think it's useful to try pretend this isn't the case.
Even the people who bought new EVs seemed to get fairly good deals on interest rates. If you were getting high interest rates, you were probably trying to buy far too much car for yourself.
In reality, most Americans live in cities and suburbs, concentrated on the costs and in the Midwest, with urbanization only increasing over time.
In other words, most people in the US already live in areas where there is sufficient density and short enough distances to live in a place where maybe you need to own a car but you shouldn't necessarily need to use the car for every type of trip.
There are suburban designs emphasizing single family homes that can still accommodate a lifestyle that isn't using a car for every type of trip, but North America has simply not developed that way.
Development in North America goes wildly beyond just accommodating cars, it instead actively designs in hostility toward pedestrians, cyclists, and generally having the chance of using anything but a car for getting around. Features like:
- Winding suburban developments separate themselves from the main street grid to eliminate thru traffic, but that also makes walking/cycling out of the development impractical by extending travel distance
- Stroads [1] and big box developments make it unsafe/impossible/impractical to walk to businesses that are right next door or otherwise in the same development, never mind crossing the actual street.
- Transit system design and schedules that emphasize downtown travel during bankers hours.
[1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/3/1/whats-a-stroad-...
I think a lot of people just prefer to live in their own house with their own yard where they can’t hear their neighbors. And those people prefer to travel in private transport that can hold a few kids and is protected from the weather.
Regarding yards and noise: you can have a yard and a garage and a separated house without having winding suburban sub-developments that chop off walking access to businesses and attractions. In my opinion, the best kind of suburban neighborhoods are connected to the normal street grid. Instead of depending on the elimination of thru traffic to keep the street quiet, the street design itself calms traffic (relatively narrow streets, frequent stop signs, and street-parked cars naturally slow traffic to around 25mph).
A great example is Lakewood, Ohio. It's an inner-ring suburb with a diverse set of income levels where most kids walk or bike to school [1]. You can take a Bus Rapid Transit service or train to downtown.
Families that live there generally own two cars and a detached home just like the deeply car-dependent suburbs, and they'd probably drive to the grocery store and often drive to work, but people there don't need to use their car for every single activity like going out to restaurants, bars, parks, school, etc.
There are also a number of apartment complexes, duplexes, and quad-plexes that provide a diverse housing stock, so it's not just a single family home suburb (enforced by restrictive zoning) where a specific type of homeowner is catered to.
[1] https://www.governing.com/archive/gov-lakewood-ohio-walking-...
Gas prices aren’t even that high — just higher than they’ve been for a few years.
I wouldn't discount the fact that gas prices affect the poorest people the most, especially since location compromise is how many people save money on housing.
Still, gas is only one component of the total cost of driving.
Adjusted for inflation, the current price of gas is on the high side, but on the other hand it's been a downright bargain since the end of the Great Recession.
Once you adjust for both inflation and higher average MPG of typical Americans' cars, I highly doubt that we're paying the most we've ever paid for gas.
On top of that, the most popular cars in America are crossover SUVs, and while they're much more fuel efficient than the old SUVs of the mid-2000's, they still sacrifice about 5 MPG or more from their sedan equivalent.
I don't believe that Americans are making "sacrifices" while huge automakers like Ford and GM are completely discontinuing sedans from their lineups in favor of SUVs that categorically get worse MPG due to their inherent aerodynamic disadvantages. Americans have apparently made the choice to not make MPG their top priority for purchase decisions despite living through high gas prices barely more than 10 years ago.
In other words, the most economic cars sold in America (cars like the Nissan Versa and Mitsubishi Mirage) are also some of the most fuel efficient. The people who own crossover SUVs and have 2 kids or less really have no room to be moaning about gas prices, as they made a conscious choice to waste fuel in exchange for "convenience" or "driving posture."
I don't think it's just the media. It's a number that you see on your drive to work, so it makes sense that it's near top of people's mind when it comes to "cost of living" or "inflation".
> My teenagers still drive around the city needlessly with their friends. My brother still drives 30 minutes away to his "favorite bbq place".
These are you examples? Just because people are living their lives doesn't mean they aren't concerned. You can still drive 30 mins to your favorite bbq place and still be concerned it takes $40 more each time you fill up your tank.