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In many cases it might be better for someone to go deeper into debt on the car if it means they will be able to focus and perform better at work. It might even be worth engaging with less scrupulous financiers. Stability in transportation unlocks a lot of opportunities.
True, being able to know for sure you can get to work (or wherever important) is a huge peace of mind. And more than peace of mind, can be critical to remaining employed, etc.
A new car does not guarantee you that. I've had partners who are way more into new cars than me and those new cars have failed to be usable in various ways.
A brand new EV was in the shop for 3 weeks. Oops, can't go to work.
A near-new car had an ECU lock up so no way to start it. Call a tow truck to the dealer ($$$) and took a week ($$$$).
A near new EV had an EV-specific problem: it refused to charge. Car ran fine, but couldn't charge so only so many miles left. Drive to dealer, took a few days. At least warranty covered it.
> In many cases it might be better for someone to go deeper into debt on the car if it means they will be able to focus and perform better at work.
Going into debt for a car (a fast depreciating asset) is always a terrible idea. If you're super rich and can afford it, fine, have fun. But for anyone counting money, it's the second worst financial decision you can ever make (second only to carrying credit card debt).
Back to having reliable transportation, which is super important for most people.
Solution? Buy two used cars for way less than half of a new car which can still fail.
I only buy cheap used cars, but always have more than one available. Occasionally one needs maintenance and is out of commission for a few days. That's fine, I have another one (actually a few more, but even one more would do). All my cars put together cost no more than an average new car today. And insurance is way cheaper since they're all old beaters.
It's like servers. You can spend gazillion on the highest end server but it can still fail resulting in downtime. Or you buy a few cheap servers for redundancy and accept that failure is ok and redundancy is in place.
> > There's an incredible amount of value in simply not worrying if your car will run when you need it to.
> True, being able to know for sure you can get to work (or wherever important) is a huge peace of mind.
If you don't worry about it not because you trust it, but because you just think you'll take it as it comes and don't particularly care if it doesn't start one day, there's also a lot of value in that you could save a lot on used prices and servicing!
How come the warranty did not cover other cases you listed (and did not give you a loaner/paid for a rental)?
Then I was taking a long trip in the El Camino and overheated, cracking the heads. While the machine shop work was underway, one of the half-shafts driving the Corvette broke loose, severely beating the underside of the car.
It was bitterly cold January, and I was left going to work on a bicycle.
I sold both classics and bought a new Saturn. Much less style, but much more reliability.
Usually buying a new car that already went to a facelift is your best bet as it means it has been significantly long enough in the market to get most of its early gremlins known and sorted.
Having said that I would now only consider buying a new car if I can pay it in one installment. I once loaned a new car and I regretted it immediately. Car was good but the amount I paid each month would have been better spent/invested elsewhere. I now drive a 20y old car that I paid cash last year. I checked before buying what were the main failure point (CVT transmission if not maintained properly) and bought a car with all the invoices and documentation checking it had been maintained properly and had her CVT oil changed. I expected a few things to fix (audio speaker, shocks) and negociated taking those into account.
The car drive very well, is spatious and comfortable, I could afford replacing it if it died suddently. I would only consider a new car if I decided to go electric but gas price would need to multiply by 3 at the very least. I've seen people going EV then back to gas when they realized that after ~8 years of use their EV needed a battery replacement whose cost negated any saving on gas. I think battery price needs to go down for more EV adoption. Nobody wants to buy a second hand EV if it needs a usd10-15k for a new battery and an EV becomes pretty much unsellable at this point without a replaced battery.
Enough people believe this that such cars are the best deal right now, by far. You're more likely to have to replace a Toyota Engine by 200,000 miles (4%) than a Tesla Battery (3%). As long as the battery has liquid cooling (aka not the Leaf) and is relatively large (small batteries do more cycles per mile) and you do a battery health check at time of purchase to look for abuse, the battery will likely outlast the rest of the car, unless you're doing Taxi type milage. In which case you need to ensure you're getting an LFP battery, which should last close to a million miles.
Its also, by far, the easiest EV to swap a battery on yourself. It might be the only one you can reasonably do in your driveway. As its 8 bolts, 3 plugs, and a quick ECU flash to get a new one going. Its also cheaper ($8k last I looked, for the 62kw model) than any other EV to swap the battery due to the lack of cooling.
Not the perfect EV, but maybe the perfect shade tree mechanics EV.
The worst part is dealing with dealers.
I'd never buy a car with a traditional CVT. Used or new. They're so incredibly unreliable over time.
I wouldn't mind picking up a used EV, assuming I can get a state of health report on the battery. Something usually pretty easy to do.
I think that was the last episode I listened to...
There are of course other trade-offs with these modes of transport, but they are usually just as fast (and sometimes faster) at single-digit-mile distances. My hope is that as we improve biking infrastructure, biking will become an increasingly-viable primary mode of transit.
[0] https://nhts.ornl.gov/assets/2022/pub/2022_NHTS_Summary_Trav...
Is also really cheap to build.
Okay, I can ignore things like the car doesn't look nice or doors don't lock. But what should I actually look for? What are the things I shouldn't compromise about? Is there some useful metric to calculate useful life of the car? Rules of thumb for issues that may arise, like bad brakes, tires, engine noise, etc? What are things I can fix myself?
Case and point, I bought a car that was fine when we inspected it, but when they picked it up with the forklift they knocked a hole in the oil pan, and we had to get it towed. $100 for a new oil pan (for the wrong year lol) and I got many years out of it.
No such thing as wrong year nor wrong model, or even wrong brand as long as it works!
Honda in particular lots of parts interchange (at least used to) between Civics and Accords and other models.
I had a fuel pump die on an older BMW on 101 (Silicon Valley near googleplex). Late on a Saturday, could not get the BMW part. Found an Audi fuel pump which was similar enough, installed it on the side of the highway and worked fine. Ran for many years, still going when I sold that car.
Cops showed up to harass us about working on the car on the side of the highway.. Fortunately my friend is a big talker and kept them entertained while I finished the installation and started the car.
Or even make! Many manufacturers use the same supplier for various parts. The lock actuator on my 2010 dodge pickup is also used in Fords.
Maybe cause I was about to get married but I loved that truck.
Honestly, it felt different for about a half hour, then just fades into the background.
The car I currently drive is a 2007 economy model I purchased for $2,000 with ~150,000 miles on it. I've had it for almost 10 years now, and it remains solid and reliable. I am meticulous about regular maintenance, though.
Buying a new cheap car is the safest, and I'm sure there are always some models available under 20K.
Poor people (or even non-poor people) can buy the cheapest transportation available. US used to have the cheapest cars in the world. Its completely changed now, all you need to do is to ask your administrators to let the manufacturers from China bring them in.
1) They can buy a cheap car that will cost nothing in fuel. This is the worlds cheapest SOLAR CAR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk6aTKV-des
2) They can buy EV KEI cars (https://insideevs.com/news/807141/byd-racco-kei-driven-japan...)
3) They can ask for biking trials to be built. Atlanta seems to have built many miles of connected trials.
4) EV Golf carts are a perfectly acceptable form of transportation: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-golf-cart-kingdom/
Ask your admin to allow cheap cars/KEI/golf and work with your local city to build walk/bike/golf-cart trials. Its a one time cost, you can make transportation cheap permanently.
New cars are nice - shiny and reliable but you pay a bit. It can also be risky from the financial point of view if you buy on credit.
A tip for buying cheap ones is buy off someone wealthy who doesn't care about the money from the old car and would otherwise get like $0 from a dealer.
Since you are sure, can you name a few?
You can't because none exist. There are no new cars in the USA for less than 20K.
The alternatives offered here are nonsensical. Where in the US does one buy this youtube solar car or KEI cars? Nowhere, that is where. They are not sold in the USA.
Golf carts are legal on hardly any roads so that is another non-starter unless you live in a neigborhood where they are allowed and never plan to go anywhere outside of it.
Cycling is great, that is the only practical suggestion on the list. But of course a bike is not a car so if someone actually needs a car, a bike is not a car.
For anyone poor who needs cheap transportation, old beater cars are the best.
Don't have to be poor either, for anyone who doesn't want to throw good money away at depreciation, old cars are the best deal. As an engineer in Silicon Valley I could technically afford many kinds of expensive cars but I've yet to ever spend more than 20K on any car or truck. Buy used, keep forever, that's the best.
https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/spt-new-cars-under-20k
There is no such thing as a new cheap car.
The Poor Man’s Shoe Theory, widely known as the Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness, is a concept that explains how those who are poor often end up spending more in the long run because they can’t afford to make quality purchases up front. This idea was popularized by Terry Pratchett, the acclaimed British writer, in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms, through a passage in which the character Captain Sam Vimes observes the realities of poverty and consumption.
“Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.”
“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
https://footwearmagazine.com/poor-man-shoe-theory-poverty-co...
Interestingly, a fair portion of junked cars get shipped overseas where the labor is very, very low cost and high tech, cheap labor chop shops in places like India or in some countries in Africa will have highly skilled workers basically cut out crumple zones and restore completely totaled vehicles into new looking cars and turn around and sell them. This would never be viable here in the States because of the labor cost, but when you are paying someone $1 USD a day to do highly skilled and technical labor like this it becomes very viable.
Another popular tactic where I live in Texas is to steal a car and drive it south of the border and strip it. Then buy a junked car same make and model with a clean VIN. Then ship that clean VIN second car south of the border as well and rebuild it with the stolen parts and ship it back over for resale.
China's EV cars are known, but it also has 350 million electric motorbikes.
Please link to some prices for motorcycles that can go 75 miles per hour (necessary on the highway) that cost < $1k. 5 seconds of googling says they start at around $5k. I have a moto so I agree with the premise broadly that more should consider them. They are not as useful in all weather and of course there is risk of injury which most poor people will have no ability to pay for in our US health care situation...
I spent some time in Vietnam back in 2005, after getting a few lifts on the the back of mopeds in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, I decided to look up some road traffic accident stats for those cities: I never took another lift like that again.
My last car was a Subaru forester that did cost a little less, was older tho, on that I spent about $800 in total per year on to keep it alive, easily doing 20k kilometres a year.
Motorcycles arent so much cheaper necessarily.
You always have the option to spend more. America has this macho bike person stereotype to live upto where you must buy a bike close to 1000CC.
Seems like most shops around me want $200+ in labor to do tires. That got me to just start doing it at home. Although it's a pain to do it right with spoons and not mar up the rims (or your fingers). I'm not bothering to invest in the space for a whole tire changing station in my garage. I definitely don't blame people for just eating the cost and doing it at a shop.
It's different with car tires because there's tons of places that do car tires. Far more competition with big national chains all over the place. Not always true with bikes. The labor costs they charge for dang near any little bit of work really drove me to do almost everything I can at home.
Banger post. My first car was a $1200 Geo Prism that I bought through the mechanic shop at the gas station up the street. It was older than my (younger) brother; got a good 5 years out of it before the transmission literally fell apart on Rt 2.
I am comfortably middle class now. I still buy budget cars because I can’t get past how outrageously expensive most cars are now. But even now I still think, every time I sit in my new (well, three year old) car: wow, this is awesome. I don’t know if my friends think those same thoughts, because I would be honestly a little embarrassed to explain why I feel that way.
Curious why not simply replace the exhaust flange? Cheap and easy repair.
I sold it off for a different $1000 car before it happened, but sounds like that's precisely what happened to you!
The last cheaper used car I bought, I kept for about 10 years, it was $10k. I sold it to my brother in-law after that, who had it another 5 years… it would have gone longer, but he didn’t realized I had changed the timing belt before I sold it to him, so he misjudged how long the one he put on would last, and it destroyed the engine… anyway, let’s go with it..
The last new car I got, was relatively inexpensive, as far as new cars go, at $35k. If a $10k used car ran for 15 years, I’d have to keep that $35k car for over 50 years to make it worth it.
New cars are almost never financially justifiable. And that new car will run into the same maintenance issues and costs as the used one as it ages.
The nicer the car, the worse this equation gets, as increased car pricing translates to luxury, not quality. This makes them very different from work boots.
I'm also a bit surprised you'd buy a new car. Off-lease is much cheaper and they're still fairly new ish.
And I guess they don't get pulled over because there aren't ALPRs or cops are ignoring the hits? I had my insurance lapse for 1 day and they still pulled me over a week later off a stale list, so idk.
Unfortunately there's a fair bit if industry built around charging people who are stretched financially more, but it's possible to avoid that.
Also, that $4K cash for clunkers was a lot. I agree with the author, that would've totally gone into my pocket if they did it today. I still have my old car from college that's worth about $500 now, purchased for $1500, and I don't need it.
Obviously insurance companies make money on average for every policy. If they didn’t, they would go bankrupt. So on average, every time you buy insurance, you lose.
So insure only what’s required by law, or things that would throw your life off track if they vanished.
If there is an accident, the insurance company will say: Your car is only worth $700 per blue book value and your deductible is $500 so here's $200 and your title is now totaled.
Buy liability only and self-insure for any damage (or just buy a new beater as needed).
With that said, I have always done my research and managed to obtain vehicles which, after maybe some high-importance fixes in the beginning, managed to last another 5-20 years without any other major work done to them.
Hell, aside from oil changes and minor fixes that I did entirely by myself, I got my last car for nearly free and it lasted me a good decade before some idiot with a jacked-up pickup - he couldn’t even see me behind him - backed into me even though I was laying on the horn like crazy.
Besides, anything prior to 2006 is going to be much easier to fix, does not have DRM, and will not spy on you unless it comes with OnStar.
Honestly, the biggest pain point these days is the lack of a true manual clutch, with the full three pedals on the floor. These vehicles are becoming distressingly rare.
Also: "Don't be snarky."
(FWIW I don't think you meant to do either of these things, but the worst internet patterns propagate unintentionally.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I doubt the "HN crowd" was about to do anything, but it'd be better if someone saw some sort of market opportunity here. It sounds pretty miserable not being able to get to a well paid job. I personally appreciate all the people who lent me money and sold me cars. It enabled a lot of income for me, over a lifetime.
US automakers have chosen to abandon anything not a $40k-$100k SUV or pickup truck, and purposely minimize production to optimize for profits over volume. You can either leave the country, pay the captive market tax, or import a cheap car when allowed to.
Chinese automakers cannot find enough marine capacity for exports at the moment (currently at a ~12M unit/year export run rate). Imports are allowed eventually imho, it’s just a matter of when (elections and representation turnover rate). Until then, the poor are held hostage for profits (as is tradition in the US).
No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban electronics in cars so you can actually hold onto them and repair them yourself.
That place decided that free public transportation was a good investment. I think many people here would see it as a waste of their tax money. But those people are not low income. They can afford to buy cars. I occasionally hear my coworkers remark about how they would never ride one of those city busses—YUCK. It kind of grinds my gears.
Living in that place made me feel like the community actually cared about me. It made a big impact on how I think about what is worth spending my taxes on. We already subsidize the middle class (roads ain’t free!) and we subsidize the heck out of corporate America. A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom.
More than half of the federal budget is for entitlements.
"When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them."
I noticed it on the front page. An hour later, it's on page 3.
<edit>
Now I'm just curious to see how fast the downward trajectory is on this currently 70-post article is. Still in the 1-2 hour range and now it is on page 4 of HN.