Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn’t been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.
I grew up hearing all sorts of addages about vehicles. “New cars lose tons of value as soon as you drive off the lot, so you’re much better off buying used”.
Once I grew up and started buying my own cars, I learned that the best miles a car has are usually right out of the factory. The sound dampening wears over time. The foam in the seats wears out. Scratches accumulate, colors fade, odors accumulate. Hoses leak, mechanicals fail.
A lot of this can be fixed, or mitigated with proper maintenance. But the ultimate lesson I learned is that the resale value only matters if you actually intend to sell the car while there is still meat left on the bone. I’m fine driving a car into the ground until it’s scrapped, so I don’t factor resale value into my purchasing decisions.
Even back in 2018 I noticed the price gap between new and used cars wasn’t as wide as I remembered it being back in 2011. I ended up with an Impreza with ~12k miles for $17k, but a new one would have been just over $20k. I was strapped for cash at the time, but I wonder if a new car would have been a better value even back then.
This was exactly the calculus I was doing with my wife in 2017~2018. Her car was a fourth-hand 2003 Hyundai Elantra which had been run in to the ground before she ever even got it (but to be fair, it was both free and better than what she was driving before). I was looking at used car prices and thinking, is it really worth it to save less than $5k when I get a car that’s 5 years newer with 50,000 fewer miles and all of its warranty in-tact? The PF advice I was seeing at that time was maddening, and mirrored a lot of what you’re saying - “cars lose half their value off the lot, buy a used civic for $5k and drive the wheels off” - but that had already not existed for years. And then the pandemic supercharged used car prices and they just sort of never came back down. And then rates went up and they still won’t come down.
We ended up buying a brand new 2019 Impreza in an undesirable color for $19k, financed with nothing down and 0.9%. Now it’s paid off, I feel like in retrospect it was very much the right call.
I bought a new car in 2018 for 19K. Everyone I know flipped at me for ‘wasting money’ and not buying a 5yo+ 10K car that looked like shit with 100K miles.
It’s now worth 21K, after 50K miles.
I’m looking at trading it in for a 35K car in the next two years, and watching the value on that car never go down either.
They definitely shouldn’t have flipped out at you about it, but that doesn’t mean they were wrong. Vehicles almost never appreciate in value; it just so happens that you accidentally timed the used car market perfectly.
If you expect that to continue happening you’re in for a surprise.
dude, everyone says the housing market will crash for 15+ year now.
We have to accept the old rules of economy are out the window. govt will bail and stimulate to no need the second the market slows down.
this is the new normal. truth is our inflated economy can’t ever allow housing values to go down anymore without causing a depression so the govt won’t allow it.
My partner took her 2022 Toyota for service and the dealership offered to buy it off her. The price was only $1k less than she paid new. That’s a year and a half of heavy use for $1k if she opts to take it.
Yup. My wife and I both own Subarus, we get “please let us buy your car!” letters from local dealerships on a monthly basis and have been since we bought hers in 2018.
I bought used in December 2020. 6 months later, the dealership called me with an offer $3k higher than the sticker price I saw. It was madness for a while!
The used car market is being strongly manipulated by the banks. Their inventory of repossessions has skyrocketed over the past few years, but they are limiting how many are going to auction so not to destroy the market and their margins. I’ve heard rumblings that with the push for EVs and their costs, carmakers are going to make them a service. You pay a monthly fee to use them and every few years you will get a new one. You will never own one outright. Who knows if this is true or not.
Probably not the point of the post, but I’ve found the economics of owning a car in general has changed for me. It actually stopped making financial sense for me to own a car in 2017-18. The pandemic drove it home. We still have one car for the house, but I wouldnt be surprised if it isn’t the last car we buy…
That was definitely my experience buying a car a few months ago. My car was totaled so I had to buy a replacement unexpectedly. I was seeing used cars with 30,000-50,000 miles selling for more than MSRP and new cars were very hard to find. I ended up buying a new car that was less expensive than the used cars I was looking at and ended up getting a much lower APR due to the fact that it was a new car.
