Why used cars are so expensive now – and when prices may drop | Hacker News Reader

Why used cars are so expensive now – and when prices may drop

businessinsider.com

6 pointspaulpauper12 comments

My theory: Pure speculation. I don't mean my own speculation, I mean speculative investing. Someone (well, a few someones) saw the chip shortage coming and invested massively buying up the inventories of failing rental companies in early 2020. Then they have been slowly trickling those cars into the market at high prices rather than selling them off en-masse at lower prices.

Relatively new rental cars are a large part of the supply where used car dealers get their inventory. There were so many of these suddenly up for sale in 2020 that all the analysts were predicting a huge drop in used car prices. Instead we got a huge increase. The only explanation I can think of is that someone organized enough funding to soak up a lot of inventory and sit on it just long enough to squeeze the market and reap massive profits.

Not slow trickling, people flooded the marked with overpriced cars. Once you see five other offers for X at 30-50% inflated price you start wondering why would you give up that 30-50%, and so now there are six offers at 130-150% previous value. Someone else looks at it and immediately jumps in trying to buy all the X listed at normal old price for a quick flip.

This is how trading scams work in EVE Online, this is how people made money taking over some rare but cheap retro game listings on Ebay by buying up cheap inventory and relisting at 5-10x. This is how great vintage video games scam of 2021 by Heritage Auctions/Wada Games works. $30 Mario 64 all of a sudden selling for $1.5 million because cellophane!

Wata & Heritage Auctions Game Scandal Blows Up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9EZQ6bott0

people who got scammed into believing in those prices already lost 1/2 of their "investments": CRASH of Sealed Video Game Prices https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuD4KEFEfnk

Of course that record $1.5 million sale of Mario 64, most common N64 game even, went to:

>The game was bought by Jim Halperin, Heritage Auction founder and co-chairman, coin dealer Rich Lecce, and game store Just Press Play owner Zac Gieg.

Jim Halperin and some other coin collector? interesting considering Halperin already was in trouble with FTC once for scamming people by inflating value of collectible coins, Im sure its just a coincidence! https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-08-10-vw-88-sto...

>But what happens if the grading service misrepresents the grade of a coin, thereby increasing its value? The commission determined that overgrading coins was a “deceptive and unfair act” prohibited by the 1914 law that created the FTC.

>Charged with this practice were two Texas-based corporations, Heritage Capital Corp. and Numismatic Certification Institute. Also named in the action were Steve Ivy and James Halperin, prominent numismatic figures.

In 2021 name of the game was hoarding and flipping asset at inflated prices. Be it cars, computer chips or houses.

Don't forget that the Obama administration had the Cash for Clunkers program that destroyed the engines of the cars that were turned in. It did take a bunch of guzzlers off the street, but it also stripped away a large number of cars that might be in the used car market still (it ended in 2009, so some 15-year old used cars are not part of our world.

Big part of the issue? Probably not. Contributor? I expect so.

Average age of cars were 14 years old and almost all exceeded 100k miles. A majority were domestic SUVs. Adding 14 years to those cars means we are missing out on 680k mostly ford and Chevy suvs made in the 90s with probably at least a quarter million miles. The us has sold close to 200 million new cars since 2009, meaning even if we assume all those clunkers were still on the road we’d increase supply by less than a half percent of new sales. Probably not much of a factor on current pricing.

2021

Yes. Bubble seems to have started popping, at least in collectors market

My car collection has lost HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS in value, and this is why I DON'T CARE! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYS2L4BRARc

If your access to this article is blocked due to a subscription requirement -- checkout this article's archive : http://web.archive.org/web/20220823054708/https://www.busine...

Posting an archive link isn’t something people would donate a coffee for, somebody else will drop in the article to post the archive.me link for the free karma ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

thanks for the feedback :)

I'm sorry, because I realize this is well-intentioned, but we don't allow bots to post to HN so I have to ban this account.

The reason we don't allow bots is that we're trying to optimize for curious conversation, and that requires human beings taking a personal interest in a topic and/or each other.

As kylehotchkiss points out, individual HN users do frequently post links to archived versions of articles.

So I understand that you want to facilitate conversations, and Thats exactly what this is doing. By automating out an annoyance, and providing more access to everyone, it allows more people to read and participate in the discussion

It adds an automated annoyance to something that users already take care of whenever needed.

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