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Comment by cjmb | Hacker News Reader

"...requires many safety features for new cars:"

> "Making them mandatory saves lives."

Alternatively: making them mandatory raises the price of new cars and pushes more consumers to buy used older cars, which are generally less safe for a variety of reasons & often worse for the environment.

Economics is always about tradeoffs. Not saying this one isn't worth it, but you're not getting a free lunch here.

source: have not bought a new car despite being in the market for one since 2020 because prices make it a bad decision. Have added an additional 20k miles to existing car.

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Only in the short term. In the long term cars only last so long. Plastic starts to wear out from sunlight exposure (ozone?) in about 10 years. Spare parts go out off production so when something breaks it is live without. Some things just aren't worth fixing. Sure it is possible to fix anything, but the labor is too high in general. Collectors sometimes pay $100,000 to restore an old care to brand new, realistically if the assembly line still existed the car would be about $8,000 (of course it wouldn't meet modern standards)

The current new car problems mean some people will be keeping old cars running a bit longer than normal, but all those cars are headed for scrap eventually. Eventually everyone will be jumping to newer cars.

I think a lot of potential car buyers are waiting for the price crisis to end. My comment was made in a more general sense.

Note that the price of the non-optional features is lower than if it were an optional feature thanks to economics of scale. So making them mandatory reduces the costs of the features.

That isn't how economics works. You can't cite a government mandated outcome and declare that the intermediary processes are cheaper because the government ordered more production of something. An "economy of scale" is something that happens in some circumstances where it is possible to increase production without incurring non-linear pressure on prices. Not a law of production or economics.

Most of the things we are discussing here are places where good manufacturing principals can bring the prices down, but it is only worth putting that investment in if demand goes up by a lot. As such government mandated outcomes often to come to pass just because the mandate ensures there is enough future demand as to make the investment worth it.

Of course the car makers are strongly involved. Things where there is no potential to reduce price don't get mandated unless they are already cheap.

Maybe it pushes some of those people to buy bikes which are a million times safer and better fir the environment.

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