True, being able to know for sure you can get to work (or wherever important) is a huge peace of mind. And more than peace of mind, can be critical to remaining employed, etc.

A new car does not guarantee you that. I've had partners who are way more into new cars than me and those new cars have failed to be usable in various ways.

A brand new EV was in the shop for 3 weeks. Oops, can't go to work.

A near-new car had an ECU lock up so no way to start it. Call a tow truck to the dealer ($$$) and took a week ($$$$).

A near new EV had an EV-specific problem: it refused to charge. Car ran fine, but couldn't charge so only so many miles left. Drive to dealer, took a few days. At least warranty covered it.

> In many cases it might be better for someone to go deeper into debt on the car if it means they will be able to focus and perform better at work.

Going into debt for a car (a fast depreciating asset) is always a terrible idea. If you're super rich and can afford it, fine, have fun. But for anyone counting money, it's the second worst financial decision you can ever make (second only to carrying credit card debt).

Back to having reliable transportation, which is super important for most people.

Solution? Buy two used cars for way less than half of a new car which can still fail.

I only buy cheap used cars, but always have more than one available. Occasionally one needs maintenance and is out of commission for a few days. That's fine, I have another one (actually a few more, but even one more would do). All my cars put together cost no more than an average new car today. And insurance is way cheaper since they're all old beaters.

It's like servers. You can spend gazillion on the highest end server but it can still fail resulting in downtime. Or you buy a few cheap servers for redundancy and accept that failure is ok and redundancy is in place.

Usually buying a new car that already went to a facelift is your best bet as it means it has been significantly long enough in the market to get most of its early gremlins known and sorted.

Having said that I would now only consider buying a new car if I can pay it in one installment. I once loaned a new car and I regretted it immediately. Car was good but the amount I paid each month would have been better spent/invested elsewhere. I now drive a 20y old car that I paid cash last year. I checked before buying what were the main failure point (CVT transmission if not maintained properly) and bought a car with all the invoices and documentation checking it had been maintained properly and had her CVT oil changed. I expected a few things to fix (audio speaker, shocks) and negociated taking those into account.

The car drive very well, is spatious and comfortable, I could afford replacing it if it died suddently. I would only consider a new car if I decided to go electric but gas price would need to multiply by 3 at the very least. I've seen people going EV then back to gas when they realized that after ~8 years of use their EV needed a battery replacement whose cost negated any saving on gas. I think battery price needs to go down for more EV adoption. Nobody wants to buy a second hand EV if it needs a usd10-15k for a new battery and an EV becomes pretty much unsellable at this point without a replaced battery.

I spent some time in Vietnam back in 2005, after getting a few lifts on the the back of mopeds in both Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, I decided to look up some road traffic accident stats for those cities: I never took another lift like that again.

My last car was a Subaru forester that did cost a little less, was older tho, on that I spent about $800 in total per year on to keep it alive, easily doing 20k kilometres a year.

Motorcycles arent so much cheaper necessarily.

The last cheaper used car I bought, I kept for about 10 years, it was $10k. I sold it to my brother in-law after that, who had it another 5 years… it would have gone longer, but he didn’t realized I had changed the timing belt before I sold it to him, so he misjudged how long the one he put on would last, and it destroyed the engine… anyway, let’s go with it..

The last new car I got, was relatively inexpensive, as far as new cars go, at $35k. If a $10k used car ran for 15 years, I’d have to keep that $35k car for over 50 years to make it worth it.

New cars are almost never financially justifiable. And that new car will run into the same maintenance issues and costs as the used one as it ages.

The nicer the car, the worse this equation gets, as increased car pricing translates to luxury, not quality. This makes them very different from work boots.

https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/spt-new-cars-under-20k

The Poor Man’s Shoe Theory, widely known as the Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness, is a concept that explains how those who are poor often end up spending more in the long run because they can’t afford to make quality purchases up front. This idea was popularized by Terry Pratchett, the acclaimed British writer, in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms, through a passage in which the character Captain Sam Vimes observes the realities of poverty and consumption.

“Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.”

“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”

https://footwearmagazine.com/poor-man-shoe-theory-poverty-co...

Curious why not simply replace the exhaust flange? Cheap and easy repair.

US automakers have chosen to abandon anything not a $40k-$100k SUV or pickup truck, and purposely minimize production to optimize for profits over volume. You can either leave the country, pay the captive market tax, or import a cheap car when allowed to.

Chinese automakers cannot find enough marine capacity for exports at the moment (currently at a ~12M unit/year export run rate). Imports are allowed eventually imho, it’s just a matter of when (elections and representation turnover rate). Until then, the poor are held hostage for profits (as is tradition in the US).

That place decided that free public transportation was a good investment. I think many people here would see it as a waste of their tax money. But those people are not low income. They can afford to buy cars. I occasionally hear my coworkers remark about how they would never ride one of those city busses—YUCK. It kind of grinds my gears.

Living in that place made me feel like the community actually cared about me. It made a big impact on how I think about what is worth spending my taxes on. We already subsidize the middle class (roads ain’t free!) and we subsidize the heck out of corporate America. A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom.

"When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them."