Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtwo | Hacker News Reader

Yeah but that’s not the whole picture… in 1962 the ford truck was $2000 now is around 40,000 so while a new one is better you still have to earn 2x as much to get the most basic one available

View on HN

When I go to ford.com and look at their basic truck, the 2023 Maverick, I see "starting at $22,195". So if a 1962 truck truly sold for $2000, the inflation seems to account for entirely the price increase. And I'm pretty sure everyone will agree a 2023 Maverick is superior to a 1962 F-100 in every conceivable aspect.

Housing and healthcare are better examples of goods or services whose prices have increased faster than CPI-U.

In the 80s when I was a kid, we owned our own house, even though my father was a small time farmer and my mother stayed home raising us. We scraped by. In today's standards, it was a life of abject poverty. I knew a guy whose father ran a steel company (self made millionaire). Their house wasn't much bigger than ours, but they had VCR, microwave, CD players and satellite TV years before we did. But the real difference was that they had a new Mercedes and we had a low-end Ford that we drove until it fell apart. Our house build cost about 4x the price of the Ford. The Merc? I don't have exact figures but I think you could have built our house at least 2.5x times before you hit the price of a new Merc. These days that's totally flipped around. For the cost of building my parents house today, you could have at least 4x new Mercs.

In the 1920s it was cheaper to retain a servant full time than to own a car. Now it's completely the other way round, and for a car a million times better. Production of goods scales; anything labour-intensive does not, especially when land supply and usage are constrained by government regulation, and cost of labo[u]r is inflated by same.

I'd be surprised if you can get a truck at anywhere near MSRP these days. Trucks aren't a great example anyways because they're seen as a luxury good in the US today, which wasn't the case in the 60s.

Check the new car market again. Buyers have radically cut back as the economic uncertainty has proceeded since summer, plus the supply chain issues continue receding into the past.

> I'd be surprised if you can get a truck at anywhere near MSRP these days.

Europe, that's where. List price vs MSRP is not a mostly US issue honestly.

Idk..

First, you can't get the old vehicle new for cheap. That option is no longer available. You do get an objectively better one, but value is fundamentally subjective.

Marginal economics bridges this gap with consumer choice, but if no choice is available then I don't think you can assume consumers are better off.

In any case, I think inflation is a backwards lens through which to examine vehicle prices. The primary mover is industrial learning curves. Inflation is downstream.

In the 20s, when domestic car sales increased annually, the auto manufacturing industry was constantly growing. Factory efficiency increased every year and prices came down every year. The model T got cheaper every year, not just better.

Part of what caused the depression was this process maturing. Auto sales peaked. Manufacturing volume stopped growing. Efficiency stopped growing with it.

This breaks many financial assumptions/instruments and results in deflation, or rather, a local quanta of deflation. Growth industries can vary a lot of long term debt/equity/promises. Shifting from one state to another is deflationary/deleveraging.

Anyway, vehicles stopped getting cheaper 100 years ago. They get better/nicer gradually. Not cheaper though, ever.

Cars don’t break down as much and last much longer. A 20 year old car nowadays can still be perfectly usable. So in effectively they did get cheaper, just buy used (at least that was the case until 2020..)

I own a 21 year old car that still drives great. It's amazing honestly.

Same, also one that is 40 and one that is 60. There hasn’t really been an increase in reliability over time. The difference between manufacturers has always been the defining factor. Simply compare a new Nissan to a new Toyota and you’ll see what I mean. Project out resale value 10 years and you’ll see a dramatic drop in value for the less reliable one. It was cheaper to manufacture, used lower quality parts and engineering and the result is wildly different reliability.

The F-150 is the lowest cost full size pickup truck Ford makes. If you can't put full sheets of plywood and 2x4s in it, it's not really a pickup truck.

  How Much Does the Ford F-150 Cost?

  The 2022 Ford F-150 starts at $29,990, which is the lowest base price in the full-size pickup truck segment. However, that's for the three-seat Regular Cab, so if you're looking for more room, take note of the Super Cab's $34,075 base price and the SuperCrew's $37,700 MSRP.

Source: https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/ford/f-150

The nearest dealer to me had 17 of them ranging in price from USD$34k to USD$62k

The 2022 Maverick has an engine literally twice more powerful than the 1962 F-100 (270 vs 135 hp). With your logic, picking on one tech detail of many, I could argue the 1962 model is "not really a pickup truck" with such a puny engine of weak towing abilities !

What this shows is that Ford merely decided to trade 18 inches of pickup box space for a second row of seat, a more powerful engine, and many other higher-end specs. Today Ford could definitely make a 1962-spec'd pickup with a weak 135 hp engine at less than $20k.

The one tech detail chosen is pretty relevant to the economic (as opposed to style) use-case here.

Being able to carry a 4x8' sheet is the difference between a productive vehicle or not for a significant chunk of the contracting tradesman market.

Sure, lots of users want trucks for other reasons where a short box does fine or a second row of seat is the winning feature regardless of box space, but the logic being applied for a full size bed requirement isn't arbitrary.

Learn to use straps, really easy to haul a 4x8' in a short bed.

Noone wants a normal bed. They want a crew cab short bed. Supply and demand.

I want a full bed. As a result when I looked I was doing so in the past. Came close to buying a VW flatbed with a tools compartment built in. Thing was from the 60s.

short bed with straps: 1] load 4x8' 2] attach straps correctly 3] tighten straps 4*] re-attach straps if incorrect

long bed: 1] load 4x8' 2] close gate

As far as 'noone wants a normal bed', citation needed.

A 1962 Ford truck would only have a single row. Without the Maverick's second row, you'd probably get a full-sized bed.

The cheapest F-100 also had a short bed, so it wasn’t a real pickup truck either. You had a pay a whole $35 extra to get the long one!

It had a bed ~2 feet longer than the 2022 Maverick.

With regards to differentiating prices of products by category over time, this chart looks relevant: http://www.roseassociates.ca/20-years-of-price-changes-in-th...

"The Price of Tomorrow" by Jeff Booth really nails this concept.

I suspect that to an extent, prices rise with the proportion of income people are willing to allocate to something. Cars will rise to the amount that matches the importance people place on them. If cars become less important due to electric bikes and Zoom, manufacturers will be able to charge less. The investment in researching car design would decrease accordingly. Same with energy sources etc.

True, but only for goods with a moat. Let's say an iPhone. I may value a fruit at 10 Euros and you may sell me a fruit at that price, but if someone else can produce them for 2 Euros they will perhaps sell them for 5 Euros and make a good profit. So the price will be 5 or even less.

You should go to a dealer and try to actually get one for $22,195. Dealers have been gouging with huge fees above sticker / MSRP.

I’d prefer a brand new 62 f-150 to a 2023 maverick.

But yeah housing is a better example. We really fucked that one up didn’t we?

Healthcare is hard because we have so many better technologies, but worse outcomes so the price increase is arguably not worth it. Maybe this one is like the truck. Lotta new technology, at the end of the day not better.

And most people rarely need a pickup truck for its specifically design utility. They likely just want a safer car which is essentially an arms race at that point. I think less pickup trucks on the road would be a good thing considering how the majority of people drive.

American CAFE standards drove people away from station wagons and towards SUVs and pickup trucks.

> They likely just want a safer car

Are modern pickup trucks objectively safer than modern cars, or is it more about the perception of driving something that feels it's half way to being an armoured vehicle?

In Europe almost no-one drives around in a truck. Even the tradespeople (carpenters, plumbers, roofers, gardeners, heating installers, you name it) all drive light vans, not trucks.

> Are modern pickup trucks objectively safer than modern cars

In a collision with a significantly lighter/smaller car? Usually

> In a collision with a significantly lighter/smaller car? Usually

Can you give a source for that?

I'm struggling to find anything up to date which isn't blatantly biased, so here's something (old!) from Berkeley Lab:

'Those who think that driving big is driving safe, or that lightweight, fuel-efficient vehicles are inherently more dangerous than their heavyweight counterparts, need to think again. A researcher with Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) has teamed with a researcher from the University of Michigan in a unique risk analysis study which shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, vehicle quality is a much more important safety factor than weight for the drivers of vehicles involved in a crash.

"Most cars are safer than the average sports utility vehicle [SUV], while pickup trucks are much less safe than all other types. Minivans and import luxury cars have the safest records," states the report, "An Analysis of Traffic Deaths by Vehicle Type and Model," which was prepared by Tom Wenzel, an energy analyst with Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division, and Marc Ross, a professor in Michigan's Applied Physics Department.'

https://www2.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/EETD-SUV-Safet...

You can't just pick one single item and consider it 'representative' of inflation. [1] Some things cost more than they used to, some less. Cars happen to have tracked very well.

[1] https://ritholtz.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/pricechanges...

They also last much longer

Or we are forced to make them last longer.

That doesn't match my experiences; IME cars do last longer now.

I have owned and spent substantial time driving a 1978 Buick Regal and a 1968 Westphalia VW van.

I don't think that you're gonna see 200K miles out of either of those vehicles. The Buick had about 120K on it and was clearly on its last legs. It's likely been scrapped. The VW only runs because I sold it to a mechanical engineer who wanted to have a project to work on with his children, and it's now a "vintage" toy instead of my daily driver.

I am at about 180K on my 2014 Tacoma and I expect to get at least another 120k out of it before I sell it.

Shout out to Toyota making 200k miles the new 100k. The Toyotas I have owned have been over 150k with very little issue.

My 2001 4Runner has over 350K miles, and is still rocking 4x4 action on the North Carolina beach daily.

Non salt state? Pre 2005 Toyotas had serious corrosion issues in salt road conditions

random anecdote: 2004 chrysler Sebring - nothing special, hit 180k before I had some 'unknown' engine problem. Mechanic spent a couple hours trying some stuff, and something worked, and I got another 60k miles out of it before it was time to let it go. That was over a 14 year period. If I was mechanically inclined, I probably could have done a little bit more on my own re: preventative/etc, to get a bit more out of it. Or... had I sunk another $2k in (estimate) to fix a bunch of stuff, who knows? I might have got another few years. But I went with something smaller, newer, better mpg, and probably overall better safety (12 years newer).

People are extremely overestimating how cars last decades ago. Barring other things, corrosion protection was nonexistent, few year old cars were rusting away.

I think a new 2022 Ford F-150 will run closer to $60k.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com