pixel 6 pro
Here's another guess at why the car market has gone so kooky. Here's what kookie means. Historically when a car gets to be about 10 years old it just isn't really worth anything. If it had somewhere around 100,000 miles on it then the value dropped to maybe $2,000 or less. And so you could buy cars that were 5 years old for about half of what they had sold for new. But over a relatively short time that model has changed. It seemed like it changed about 3 years ago just about the same time as covid. Just about the same time as Trump having the election stole from him. It's in the same basic time frame as Putin deciding to start another war. And it's in the same time frame as black matter lives. All of this stuff seems fake and just made up. It feels like God is jumping up and down on the command console in the throne room laughing and screaming and just causing all kinds of crazy nutty stuff to take place. Now it obviously can get way crazier and nuttier, but you can tell it's having a toll on people. I mean how much can the planet take God? And the thing that's really crazy is you could fix most of it by just eliminating a tiny number of people. No kidding if you just got rid of say probably less than 100,000 people out of 7 billion you could fix most of the problems we've got. Think about how crazy that is. Anyway back to the car market.
3 years ago cars that were 5 years old started selling for almost the same price as they were brand new. And cars with 100,000 miles on them we're selling for maybe 70% of new. That is crazy. The only way that would make sense is if these cars are going to go over 200,000 miles and last a minimum of 15 years. Now maybe they realize that cars are starting to do that. So it just means that cars have more value longer. But if cars keep wearing out at about 100,000 miles and lasting about 10 years then this model of charging a whole bunch for worn out cars is not going to work. People like me just won't be able to buy another car knowing it's just going to wear out as soon as we buy it. Which will basically force you to hang on to an old car until you have to pedal it around with bicycle pedals. You can spend $30,000 on a car that's only going to last a year or two.
Another thought is that somehow this whole electric car thing is going to drastically change how long people keep cars. Supposedly Tesla's are lasting around 400,000 miles. If that gets to be the standard then yeah car values are going to remain high for the first 10 years or longer. What will negatively impact their value is if they have an accident or if there's some kind of manufacturing flaw discovered. Otherwise these cars will just keep rolling down the road racking up the miles. And in that case a used car with 100,000 miles on it has still got 80% of its value.
But we're in a transition phase and it's not clear to me that the things above are true.

Comments
Post a Comment
Life is short. Make it count.
†