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Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

You can get excellent quality refurbished(aka renewed) phones for incredibly cheap that are only a year or two behind the current models. I don't think I've ever bought a brand new phone and paid full price. In fact, I only buy a new phone when the battery starts to die and it's not serviceable. I can't honestly say I understand why people believe they need to buy the latest phone every year or two.

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Same with cars. I fail to understand why anyone would spend 20k on a brand new Focus, for example, when for the same money you can get a 5 year old Mercedes c (also an example)

I'm fairly confident in terms of total cost of ownership and reliability of a new Focus will outlast the 5 year old C class.

I'm pretty sure this isn't as true as it once was. All of the used cars I've purchased that were manufactured in the last 15 years have been nearly impossible to destroy (without outright crashing them) even with extreme negligence. Not only that, but they were always in pretty good shape. That's just my experience, though. I've still not even come close to the cost of buying new versions of any of the cars I've owned.

Buy one for 15k. It will still be better and i doubt the difference will come to more than "total cost of ownership".

of course it's a bigger car so more expensive to run. so buy a 5yo focus and get the best of both worlds.

Yeah, was my thought too. A 2018 Focus will probably be pretty reliable, still have some parts under warranty, and have a lower TCO than having to insure and repair an older Mercedes.

Maybe outside of North America. The automatic transmission had big problems here. Ford tried to game the fuel economy with a cheap unreliable transmission. Unlike other regions which got torque-converted autos and popular manual options, almost all the Foci were sold with a dry Dual Clutch Transmission (DCT). This worked on the highway, but around town is was programmed to "crawl" like an automatic, slipping the dry clutch and wearing out very fast. Big class actions happened and now Ford quit selling cars here, only Mustangs and trucks.

Some older Mercedes might have a lower TCO than a 2018 focus, but only because the focus is disastrously unreliable.

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