Average new car price crosses $40k in 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Average new car price crosses $40k in 2020

cnet.com

9 pointspaulpauper12 comments

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We have two cars, mine and my wife’s. My car...

- is paid for (the single best thing about it)

- is a 13-years-old Mitsubishi Spyder Eclipse that’s done ~50k miles and runs like a dream

- has been a bastion of reliability over the years

- has never failed to start, even when left standing for 6 months due to CV19

- still has great pick up and is fun to drive

My wife has a much newer car, with far more technology in it, backup cameras, satellite radio, tire pressure sensors, Bluetooth, built-in gps, etc. etc. etc. Her car

- has the saving grace of also being paid for

- always seems to have something wrong with it, some minor sensor is broken, or false-alerting, or something. Most-recent is the passenger seatbelt-not-being-worn chiming away, when there’s no passenger.. which apparently needs the $$$ entire seat being replaced.

- does not have the innate reliability of my car,

- has had its battery replaced a couple of times

- has needed to be charged three times now, after being left for a few weeks at a time due to CV19. We just plug it in every weekend now.

- was significantly more expensive (admittedly, bought 7 years later) than my car

I’m not sure, based admittedly on anecdote, that the trend towards ever-more-complex and consequently ever-more-expensive cars is a great one. The cynic in me thinks that minor sensors going wrong and needing major parts replaced to fix them, is a good way for manufacturers to make a fair amount of money on the sly.

Anyway, I can’t see myself replacing my car any time soon, for me they’re a way of getting from A to B, and reliability is the prime concern. The spyder is “nice enough” that I don’t want to risk the reliability.

I'm happy never buying a car until significant right-to-repair laws are passed. We need to be able to get our cars fixed anywhere and car makers need to be pushed to more standard practices and parts.

Russia and post society states used to have that car you want. It ran like garbage and required constant repairs. It was basically like buying a windows XP machine that you only had an OEM version of the OS before the days of enumerable freeware we do today. Meaning, good luck when you got a virus...might as well start learning Assembly.

While I do generally agree with what you are saying, you never mention what your newer car actually is. The strength of your argument changes if you're comparing against another Mitsubishi versus a British roadster or anything made by GM.

Sorry, meant to say, its a VW Jetta

What is the other car?

Sorry, meant to say, its a VW Jetta.

> has never failed to start, even when left standing for 6 months due to CV19

Aren’t there other reasons beyond just the battery draining to start the car and drive it a bit at least once every few weeks?

I’ve been working from home but still take my car for a short drive every two weeks to avoid things like flat spots on my tires, fuel spoilage, seals and gaskets drying out and becoming brittle, etc.

For most cars if I left them sitting for a month or more I’d expect to jumpstart the battery and don’t think that’s totally unreasonable.

That's a lot of money. I like cars, and I like motorcycles even more, but I can't imagine spending a whole year of my life just paying for it (after taxes and essential living costs).

$40k could buy you incredible memories, not just a slightly nicer appliance.

Take a look at some of the “worst” new cars you can buy. The ones with no options. They still have power windows, air conditioning, fuel injection. If you grew up in the 70s and 80s it’s like a miracle that all cars have those things now.

The average price of a used vehicle in the last quarter of 2020 rang in at $27,689, while the average new car price is $40,107--a discount of 31%?

People pay far less than this for the average used car.

That's your anecdotal evidence from the people you know. That's how many?

While my own anecdotal evidence of our family would corroborate what you're saying, the article gives some pretty good anecdotal counter evidence of "the long-term shift to SUVs and pickup trucks doesn't help", which I am definitely seeing with friends and colleagues. There are so many people that don't actually know what their car costs them, because all they look for is the weekly payment. Sure, it's just a hundred bucks or something. But it's per week. Over 96 months. For a used car off a 3 year lease. That is effing expensive!

So if we assume that the article is actually based on a much much larger sample I would tend to believe them more than our two anecdata.

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