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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of very high quality vehicles available for purchase at less than $47k for new and $28k for used.

The average sale price is skewed by people choosing luxury purchases by buying larger (and fancier) than necessary vehicles. Also can be skewed by vehicles lasting longer in the first place, meaning poorer people do not need to buy cars as often, but richer people can choose to buy cars more often.

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That helps a little, but still makes care ownership prohibitively expensive for young people. You're still looking at $350 per month for a 5 year old or newer vehicle, i.e. one that's reliable and has lower maintenance (and aggravation) costs.

That still leaves you paying a little over $600 per month. From that point as you start lowering your finance costs you're going to increase your maintenance and aggravation costs.

There are plenty of reliable 15-year old cars. (My wife drives a reliable 18-year old, 225K mile car. We took it on a 1600 mile roundtrip for the winter holidays this year with no particular fear that it wouldn't run like a top for the entire trip.)

The idea that cars are only reliable for 5 years and 60K miles is, IMO and IME, quite out-dated. That was more true in the days of carburetors, points-based ignition, and mazes of vacuum lines. A modern (meaning post-1996 at least) electronic fuel-injected car with electronic ignition and closed-loop fuel control tends towards very reliable for 15+ years and 200K+ miles.

There is a very interesting thing happening in the "car knowledge space". At least for young people.

Myself and a few of my friends drive exclusively Honda/Toyota and drive them to 200k and then sell them to people who know how to do their own car work.

A few of my friends are from well off families and they buy cars brand new and drive them to 60-80k and then act like the car isnt reliable anymore for some reason despite the fact that I usually buy my car with 60-80k miles on it.

* all distance here is miles sorry for confusion

New buyers often have the ability to write off the purchase which gives them a substantial discount.

Write it off what?

If the car is purchased for a business you can write off the depreciation.

I do not see how that is applicable in a discussion about young people at large being able to afford cars for personal use.

It is relative to the context of the comment of why people might buy new vehicles when it does not appear to make economic sense.

I should also point out, and this is something I only learned recently, you can't get a car loan for a car that's over 10 years old.

About five years ago my mechanic told me there was a Lexus I needed to look at. Single (obsessive) owner, extremely low miles for the year, extremely clean, my mechanic had done all the work since the time the vehicle was no longer under the Lexus service and warranty.

The catch? It was over 10 years old. That's when I learned you can't get a loan for a car that's over 10 years old. I had the wherewithal to pay cash (it was over $10K for the car, but it was a steal!) but that's not something young people are going to be able to do.

Not true. I did it recently for a 20 year car through a credit union. Just paid a slightly higher interest rate.

I just bought a 2007 F-150 and financed it through my credit union with no issues. Granted, it was $6000 so I only financed it because I didn't want to dip into savings, and it's pretty hard to find a manual transmission pickup in that price range that's clean with below 130k miles.

An inability to get a loan on them would tend to make cars over 10 years artificially cheap/a better value than otherwise.

That's true, so long as you have the means for getting the money, which most young people don't.

I have a 15 year old, 20 year old, and 25 year old vehicle.

They're very reliable.

They're also not for sale.

>They're also not for sale.

There's a famous economics paper on this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Used cars are an example of information asymmetry. If someone has a "bad" car they'll want to sell it. If they have a "good" car they'll want to keep it. Especially if both cars have the same market value because the buyer can't distinguish between the good and bad cars.

Vehicles in areas of the country with snow and salt also used to routinely rust out in about 5 years.

That 18-year old CR-V lived its entire life in snowy New England (upstate NY, then NH, now MA) and it is likely that it will be retired because of rust rather than a mechanical cause, though it will be well over 20 years old at that point.

Prior to the 1980s, very few car makers used galvanized steel. After the 1980s, most cars are galvanized, meaning they'll stay structurally sound in the snow belt far longer than before. (They'll still show some cosmetic rust long before becoming in any way unsafe.)

Yeah, I'm mostly talking about pre-80s.

That said, with my 1997 Honda del Sol that I got rid of a few years ago, the mechanics at the dealer took to coming over and looking at it because they said there were very few on the road any longer because the wheel well rusted out. (I had garaged mine in the winter for a number of years.)

To be fair no young people I ever knew bought new cars unless they were rich (i.e. top-paying job), or their family paid for it. We got crappy worn out Nissan Sentras for $2k.

Young people want fun "cheap" cars. E.g. the Miata, 86, WRX, Civic SI/type R.

All of these cars ended up with significant markups over MSRP due to COVID and some (e.g. type R) are still massively marked up.

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