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Comment by latchkey | Hacker News Reader

I'd personally never buy a new car again. The moment you drive it off the lot, you've lost value.

The hard part with that though is finding a used car that fits your criteria. Even with all the search engines online now, they don't cover all the various features cars can come with. You setup a specific search and they email you seemingly random results. It is maddening.

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I think part of the value drop is due to a fundamental lack of certainty over what has happened in the life of a used car, however short. Did it have undocumented problems, etc. If you buy a new car you don’t have that uncertainty.

This is why I love the idea of importing used vehicles from Japan (I live in Australia)

They're some of the most over serviced and least questionable vehicles I've ever seen

The online JDM car auctions are fascinating to observe even if you're not interested in cars

My understanding is it's the opposite. No one services vehicles in Japan because after a few years they cost more to keep on the road than they are worth.

Indeed, my first used car that was otherwise in good repair and wasn't cheap had a recurring carpet beetle infestation that popped up each spring. Hundreds of the things crawling out of every crevice, and there was no way to know about it until months after I had purchased the vehicle. Could never find the source, but got it managed with yearly treatment. It makes me quite reluctant to buy used cars again.

I've occasionally heard of those kinds of problems from acquaintances, but I've heard and seen so many more newly introduced defect problems and individual car misassembled problems. On average, I think a used car is a car that has been debugged under warranty by someone else with its design critiqued collectively.

The discount for the possibility that the last owner was in the bottom 20% seems to not take into account the positive aspects of a car that is at least 2 years old, 80% of the time.

This is why ex-lease vehicles are the ones to go for, at least in Australia.

They are typically driven by older people who want the latest shiny thing after the lease expires after 3-4 years vs being dumped due to issues.

Isn't it like this with any car? You always are paying at a markup whether new or old.

Not every car! My gently used SUV reports having about the same or slightly higher value than the sales price on KBB for my area.

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