Before getting a job in software, I used to buy cars from insurance auctions. Plenty of cars that run and drive end up there for various reason and if you were patient, you could get running and driving cars for $1000 or less (This was 7+ years ago). The catch is that you don't know what you're getting. You either have to have be mechanically inclined or know somebody who is to walk the lot and check the cars out before you bid.
Case and point, I bought a car that was fine when we inspected it, but when they picked it up with the forklift they knocked a hole in the oil pan, and we had to get it towed. $100 for a new oil pan (for the wrong year lol) and I got many years out of it.
This using fork lifts to move cars is crazy. When the car runs why tf do it?! Seen many YT channels show it happening and there is almost always damage.
If it fits, it's not the wrong year. I once put an exhaust manifold from a 95 Civic into a 98 Civic (replacing its cracked one that was filling the cabin with toxic exhaust fumes). I had gone to a Honda dealer to inquire about a new one; it cost too much, but the guy gave me some free nuts for bolting on a used one before I went on my merry way. Did the work myself. I seem to remember those things have two oxygen sensors that had to be moved from old to new.
> If it fits, it's not the wrong year. I once put an exhaust manifold from a 95 Civic into a 98 Civic
No such thing as wrong year nor wrong model, or even wrong brand as long as it works!
Honda in particular lots of parts interchange (at least used to) between Civics and Accords and other models.
I had a fuel pump die on an older BMW on 101 (Silicon Valley near googleplex). Late on a Saturday, could not get the BMW part. Found an Audi fuel pump which was similar enough, installed it on the side of the highway and worked fine. Ran for many years, still going when I sold that car.
Cops showed up to harass us about working on the car on the side of the highway.. Fortunately my friend is a big talker and kept them entertained while I finished the installation and started the car.
There's an incredible amount of value in simply not worrying if your car will run when you need it to. Cortisol is one hell of a drug.
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. It might even be worth engaging with less scrupulous financiers. Stability in transportation unlocks a lot of opportunities.
> There's an incredible amount of value in simply not worrying if your car will run when you need it to.
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.
Oh, I read that quote the opposite way (wrongly, I think now) –
> > There's an incredible amount of value in simply not worrying if your car will run when you need it to.
> True, being able to know for sure you can get to work (or wherever important) is a huge peace of mind.
If you don't worry about it not because you trust it, but because you just think you'll take it as it comes and don't particularly care if it doesn't start one day, there's also a lot of value in that you could save a lot on used prices and servicing!
While I have always tried to live my life by your assumed philosophy, I think they were simply saying that since (on average) a more expensive vehicle often means a more mechanically sound vehicle less likely to break down. It’s not just the peace in being less likely to have to deal with that situation, it is the stress when it occurs. If you have to buy a $1000 car, you aren’t likely to have savings sitting around available to you to fix your vehicle when something needs replacement every month or two. Knowing that entire situation is constantly looming is just another slice of the high background stress pie. Newer (more expensive) vehicles will tend to have more wear left on operational parts, so they tend to have less mechanical breakdowns and less parts that need be replaced. Many are the breakdowns that “could” happen with any vehicle, but a lot more are just parts wearing out from age; brakes here, CVs there, gas pump one day, a battery another. They all add up quickly, especially for someone who can’t fix their own car (a single mother of two just trying to get to her jobs, for example), especially when it not only costs you money, you may not even get paid because you couldn’t make it to work and had to call out (and if you’re lucky, don’t get fired because it has happened too much). That entire situation isn’t stress that you can just casually ignore — or at least, that was my experience while being poor.
Two of the three warranty covered it. I don't remember why the ECU repair was not fully covered by warranty (that was over 25 years ago) but I do remember the sting of paying for it since we were younger and poorer at the time.
I've never had a dealer provide any loaner car. The best I've seen is they give a coupon for $xx off a rental from the car rental place next door.
That's strange. Even when I had a Hyundai, I would get a loaner/rental from the dealer and it was not some exceptional dealer as I moved across the country with that vehicle so I dealt with two different dealers (and the second one has not even sold me a car).
Not even close. For example insurance on my early 90s Mazda is $192. Insurance on my partner's three year old VW is almost $900. I could have a fleet of four older Mazdas and still be cheaper to insure.
I assume the difference here is that the newish VW is all-risk covered (theft, damage to own car, etc) while the Mazda is covered for liability only and that it would be possible to insure the newer car for liability only for about the same amount as you pay for the Mazda.
Technically it has comprehensive as well although it's a moot point. My deductible is $1000 and they'll just say the car is worth less than that, so they'll never pay anything.
I guess I should reduce it to liability only but it'll probably save me like $2, so haven't bothered.
I used to use the two car method. I was single and carefree, so I had a Corvette and a hot rod El Camino. Perfect for a young shade tree mechanic.
Then I was taking a long trip in the El Camino and overheated, cracking the heads. While the machine shop work was underway, one of the half-shafts driving the Corvette broke loose, severely beating the underside of the car.
It was bitterly cold January, and I was left going to work on a bicycle.
I sold both classics and bought a new Saturn. Much less style, but much more reliability.
People say buying used car is a lottery, but so is buying a new released car model. I've seen people having to send their brand new shiny car to the shop on a regular basis. The odds of getting a good experience are higher than blindly buying a second hand car with unknow history but not necessarily much better than buying a 20y old car (whose typical failure points are well known by that point) with complete documented history and knowing a good maintenance shop.
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 think you greatly overestimate how many 8-10 year old EVs will actually require replacement batteries. Barring a few models with poor engineering choices, most cars will still have 80% of their capacity after 10 years and won't have the downsides of having a 10 year old ICE engine with a variable record of maintenance.
Perhaps, but remember that people have taken cues from their most-used battery-powered device. In this case, their phone (or laptop).
A degraded battery in these devices leads to things like random power-offs or dropping to 1% randomly (the display does not correct itself as it assumes it's safer to round down), particularly when it's cold. When it shuts itself down, it clearly displays that it has power remaining, but the device communicates that it thinks it knows better than you.
It is this bad software (and bad hardware) in these computing devices that ultimately what has led to EVs- new and especially used- being a tough sell far before the first one was ever released. The technology has proven fundamentally untrustworthy in low-stakes applications; why should it now be trusted in high-stakes applications?
(The answer so far has been "give them an utterly ridiculous horsepower figure", which did work, but it turns out normal cars can do that pretty easily too, and they're cheaper.)
Is an EV with 80% battery still usable? I ask because phones with 80% batteries are practically e-waste, or urgently needing a replacement. It's not a fair comparison but that degraded battery in a phone is a problem, because the phone still requires a certain amount of power that the battery now struggles to provide and overheats, in many cases, causing secondary damage to other components (like the display).
Phone batteries have relatively little margin. If it lasts barely a full day at full capacity, going down to 80% means you can no longer reliably say "I'll charge it overnight".
A car battery that lasted 300km new but now only 200km is still entirely adequate for a commuter with a 25km typical commute, and occasional 75km days out.
EVs that are 10 years old now will have a lower range than current models, AFAIK, so 80% of that might still be limiting. They will also be slower charging.
Do the vast majority never drive a long distance? If you use a car purely for short journeys maybe. Is this common in the US? Everywhere I have lived most people do atleast some long (i.e. an ICE car needs refuelling at some point) some long trips.
> 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.
Enough people believe this that such cars are the best deal right now, by far. You're more likely to have to replace a Toyota Engine by 200,000 miles (4%) than a Tesla Battery (3%). As long as the battery has liquid cooling (aka not the Leaf) and is relatively large (small batteries do more cycles per mile) and you do a battery health check at time of purchase to look for abuse, the battery will likely outlast the rest of the car, unless you're doing Taxi type milage. In which case you need to ensure you're getting an LFP battery, which should last close to a million miles.
Even Leaf batteries can be fine. A used Leaf might be the best deal going right now due to everyone being afraid of the battery, but if it hasn't been fast charged a ton its fine. Specifically the second gen "plus" models are great due to the larger battery meaning they have less wear.
Its also, by far, the easiest EV to swap a battery on yourself. It might be the only one you can reasonably do in your driveway. As its 8 bolts, 3 plugs, and a quick ECU flash to get a new one going. Its also cheaper ($8k last I looked, for the 62kw model) than any other EV to swap the battery due to the lack of cooling.
Not the perfect EV, but maybe the perfect shade tree mechanics EV.
EV batteries are pretty reliable, however the suspension system and wheel bearings and physical brakes are more likely to be neglected because it sees less shop time despite usually weighing more.
I think most of the bodies of EVs will rust out before most batteries are actually too degraded to use. Just like many ICE cars.
Do your research first, talk to a mechanic friend or relative about what cars are reliable. Get a late model of that or an older one with few miles. Stay away from CVT transmissions, avoid the first model of a car, go with a model that’s been around for years (plenty of parts and bugs worked out). Get the most basic version, and go for reliability over style.
In the US new cars come with a warranty and a lemon law. So if it goes to shop on a regular basis it can be replaced/refunded. And if it needs to go to the shop it's free and you get a loaner/free rental while it's there. Nothing like that is possible with a 20 y.o. car.
I as mentionning the odds of having issues and the myth of new = painless experience. Brand new models often have issues, hence my recommendation for models that have been in the market for several years already where early issue have been solved already.
If you don't rag on them and get the oil changed on schedule I haven't seen too many Nissan CVT problems. The ones I do are driven by people with a lead foot and always breaking traction and full throttle accelerating often.
I usually just tell people to get their cvt fluid changed on schedule or sooner because its a steel belt and it does wear and shed metal particles.
I've seen about a dozen, and I only know about a dozen Nissan owners. In fact, I've yet to meet a long time Nissan CVT owner who didn't have significant CVT related issues, even if they allegedly did the maintenance on time. Because...
> its a steel belt and it does wear and shed metal particles.
They're so worried about the wear on a battery meanwhile this has a part that's constantly producing metal wear particles inside the transmission practically by design. The transmission will fail, and it'll probably be pretty destructive when it goes. At least from the dozen or so examples I've personally seen.
Well, you don't know me, but I can assure there exists at least one person (me), who bought a Nissan Micra CVT in 1993 and still uses it, and they had never had any issue with the CVT. The rest of the car obviously shows its age, but CVT has never been a problem.
I mean engines got metal-on-metal wear too, it is just taken care of by filtering and frequent oil changes. The cvt has that too, but under slightly better conditions so it has a longer oil lifespan. But it still needs replacement and filters, and people don't account for the amount of usage outside of "average" usage.
The manual may say replace your cvt fluid at 100k miles, but that average includes all the old grannies that you regularly pass on your way to work. For some drivers it should be replaced twice as often due to driving patterns, just like engine oil should, but that isn't well advertised unfortunately and I think it leads to a lot of failures.
But the wear caused from dirty transmission oil increases exponentially so there is a point where you can go from "transmission is perfectly fine" to "the transmission is totally fucked" pretty rapidly. I could see how that is seen as a flaw still, but others could argue that it is simply a maintenance issue. Just like the many engines where timing belt failures can cause engine destruction.
If they're operating properly there should be almost no actual metal on metal contact. "Fluid bearings" and all. It's an important aspect to how long the life of modern engines are. If you actually have metal on metal on most engine components it won't last much longer.
A CVT requires metal on metal friction to function at its most basic level. Your transmission is ultimately a war component, designed to fail.
You might as well argue the same about batteries. If you don't overly rely on DCFC, if you don't discharge them too much, if you stay in the 20-80% range mostly, if you're not constantly doing high-amperage pulls ("If you don't rag on them"), etc. Take care of it and it'll last a long time. Stress it out all the time and it'll wear out quick.
I'm not arguing batteries aren't an expensive wear component. They are, and they are largely the wear component to care about on a used one.
I'm just pointing out CVT are also an expensive wear component. It's a double standard to be OK with one while acting like the other is some odd uncommon issue. But in the end one you can usually plug in an OBD reader in and know the actual health of the battery, the other requires you trusting the owner cared and that they and you aren't just unlucky or have an extensive tear down from a mechanic.
I knew that CVT on mine would be reliable as long as periodic oil change has been done in due terms which was the case. I wouldn't have bought it had I not have access to the complete service history.
There's an incredible amount of value in having a job. In caring about your job. In having a job where it matters if you perform well or not. In being in a position to engage with less scrupulous financiers. In stability. In having opportunities in the first place.
For me a loan would be far more stressful than fixing a 20 year old car, but I have worked for myself for 15 years so my priorities are probably skewed
My wife was from Reno, I was from NY. The week before we got married (in 1996) we were out there and her sister lent us a 1979 F150 at about 2O0k miles —- 3-on-the-tree, no air, AM radio, lap belts. The passenger door would fly open on left turns unless it was locked. I nearly lost my brother when I picked him up at the airport and forgot to warn him.
Maybe cause I was about to get married but I loved that truck.
I always wanted to try a three one the tree, just cause they were so different. Alas all the cars I've ever owned were 5 or 6 speeds. Today I drive an EV with no gears. Maybe someday a collector will trust me with his car - but I wouldn't myself with something classic.
I drive an 04 Civic I got from a coworker for $2000 seven years ago. One door handle is missing, the trunk leaks a bit when it rains, some of the ceiling fabric is starting to droop, the clear coat is mostly peeled off, first gear requires some finesse, and if you roll down one of the windows too far, it's going to take two people and 45 minutes to get it back up.
But it drives, requires only the usual regular maintenance, and isn't tracking me. I'm going to drive it until it turns to dust beneath me (or more likely, like the article says, when repairs get more costly than what it's worth).
> when repairs get more costly than what it's worth
I've never understood why that would be a relevant criteria?
If the car is cheap enough, it's easy for any repair to cost more. So what?
The comparison to make is not whether the repair cost or car value is higher.
The interesting comparison is whether repairing this car I already own is cheaper or more expensive than selling it getting a different one. Nearly always (unless catastrophic failure like blown engine etc) it is cheaper to repair the one I already own.
"Than what it's worth" is basically a shorthand for "if the cost of repairs is more than what it'd cost to buy a less problematic car, it probably makes more sense to just buy a less problematic car with that money"
I have never owned a vehicle newer than 20 years old, I have just never seen the point of doing so. The financial math just never worked out.
With that said, I have always done my research and managed to obtain vehicles which, after maybe some high-importance fixes in the beginning, managed to last another 5-20 years without any other major work done to them.
Hell, aside from oil changes and minor fixes that I did entirely by myself, I got my last car for nearly free and it lasted me a good decade before some idiot with a jacked-up pickup - he couldn’t even see me behind him - backed into me even though I was laying on the horn like crazy.
Besides, anything prior to 2006 is going to be much easier to fix, does not have DRM, and will not spy on you unless it comes with OnStar.
Honestly, the biggest pain point these days is the lack of a true manual clutch, with the full three pedals on the floor. These vehicles are becoming distressingly rare.
Growing up, my Dad would buy cars from bulletin board ads where he worked at NASA. I was third of six kids and we had a fleet of as many as six cars at a time at our house. Oil changes were unnecessary, but adding oil every tank of gas was common.
I'm driving a 2005 Toyota Matrix with 230K miles that I bought new in 2004. It's just recently needed oil added before an oil change is due.
Interesting. I'm far from poor, but that's pretty much exactly how I buy cars, and I have never regretted it. The couple of times that I bought more expensive cars, I've regretted it. The only time I'd take out a loan to buy a car is in an emergency situation. That's happened once, and is one of the purchases I regretted.
The car I currently drive is a 2007 economy model I purchased for $2,000 with ~150,000 miles on it. I've had it for almost 10 years now, and it remains solid and reliable. I am meticulous about regular maintenance, though.
Are you able to do your own work though? I use and prefer old cars, but I know I won't always be able to because I won't personally be able to deal with the issues on my own.
I can do the basics like oil changes. I don't, though, because it's worth it to me to pay my mechanic to do all the maintenance. I'd do the same if the car were new.
I asked everyone I knew who they used, paid attention to which ones people had stuck with the longest, then tried those ones out by getting oil changes from them. Then out of the ones that I had good vibes from, I chose the one that was physically closest to where I live.
To get back to the essay's point, car know-how has traditionally been a blue-collar preserve. YouTube and a bespoke forum for each make and model changed all that. Fixing and maintaining a beater is a source of pride, particularly for the well-heeled who, like Zuck's bow hunting foray, will go out of their way to simulate a more rustic existence.
I honestly don't know what the essay's point is. It starts off promising, gives good general advice about looking at friend of friends to finding these cars and looking past cosmetic issues. But it stops there.
Okay, I can ignore things like the car doesn't look nice or doors don't lock. But what should I actually look for? What are the things I shouldn't compromise about? Is there some useful metric to calculate useful life of the car? Rules of thumb for issues that may arise, like bad brakes, tires, engine noise, etc? What are things I can fix myself?
In the course of my work I deal with organizations who sell cars out of impound lots. There is a whole capitalistic recycling industry of buying junked cars and reassembling them into functioning vehicles again.
Interestingly, a fair portion of junked cars get shipped overseas where the labor is very, very low cost and high tech, cheap labor chop shops in places like India or in some countries in Africa will have highly skilled workers basically cut out crumple zones and restore completely totaled vehicles into new looking cars and turn around and sell them. This would never be viable here in the States because of the labor cost, but when you are paying someone $1 USD a day to do highly skilled and technical labor like this it becomes very viable.
Another popular tactic where I live in Texas is to steal a car and drive it south of the border and strip it. Then buy a junked car same make and model with a clean VIN. Then ship that clean VIN second car south of the border as well and rebuild it with the stolen parts and ship it back over for resale.
One solution that exists in third world is motorbikes. New motorbikes cost ~$1000. These are perfectly acceptable, ideal for the western economies, if there are enough of them on the road, it will get safer. One bike in between 10,000 cars is hard to see, but enough of them create bike-awareness.
China's EV cars are known, but it also has 350 million electric motorbikes.
Please link to some prices for motorcycles that can go 75 miles per hour (necessary on the highway) that cost < $1k. 5 seconds of googling says they start at around $5k. I have a moto so I agree with the premise broadly that more should consider them. They are not as useful in all weather and of course there is risk of injury which most poor people will have no ability to pay for in our US health care situation...
You are right (and other comments). I still have last years info when there were a few models available for under 20K. I guess with inflation, the cheapest 2026 cars seem to be 22K-ish. Some 2025 models are available for ~19K, but they won't last long.
They will not get as safe as cars. They are inherently dangerous, it's like taking a car and removing every safety feature. Removing doors, windows and belts. There's a reason that there is a legal requirement in many countries to wear a helmet.
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 honda NC750 at 10 years old cost me $4200. I had to replace wheels once (rubber, $600) and the transmission failed on me ($850) all within my first 8k kilometers.
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.
NC750 is 750cc. Very big super costly bikes are an American thing. Third world works perfectly fine with a 50CC - 150CC for under $1000, to a super premium bike 300CC if you want to show off.
You always have the option to spend more. America has this macho bike person stereotype to live upto where you must buy a bike close to 1000CC.
I live in Switzerland tho. But might be true, it's "big" because of mountains and because I actually use it to commute and travel on the autobahn which is no fun if you are slower than anyone else. Most people here have 500-800cc
If you're not changing your own tires a lot of cycle shops charge a good bit for labor to mount tires.
Seems like most shops around me want $200+ in labor to do tires. That got me to just start doing it at home. Although it's a pain to do it right with spoons and not mar up the rims (or your fingers). I'm not bothering to invest in the space for a whole tire changing station in my garage. I definitely don't blame people for just eating the cost and doing it at a shop.
It's different with car tires because there's tons of places that do car tires. Far more competition with big national chains all over the place. Not always true with bikes. The labor costs they charge for dang near any little bit of work really drove me to do almost everything I can at home.
Every motorbike shop has the tooling amortized already. It takes less than 5 minutes to swap a tire and motorcycle tire tend to be cheaper than highend bicycle tires due to economy of scale.
The Honda NC750 isn't a superbike, there is no reason to spend that amount of money on 2 tires.
Ok, you go tell that to the two shops within a reasonable distance to me. Last time I tried telling them that they didn't budge.
I'm well aware they're charging a lot for it. They do it because that's what people around here pay for it. And given they've got a few days of work queued up before they even got around to fixing up the fork tubes I removed for them, it seems like they're not hurting for business charging what they charge.
I'm not poor but I think it's ridiculous to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a car. I learned that after buying a new car when I got my first job. Since then about $5k is my limit.
The median US commute distance is <10 miles [0], which is well within ebike or motorcycle range. You can get a new ebike on Amazon that will go up to 30mph for $500, or get a used motorcycle that will go highway speeds for ~$2500.
There are of course other trade-offs with these modes of transport, but they are usually just as fast (and sometimes faster) at single-digit-mile distances. My hope is that as we improve biking infrastructure, biking will become an increasingly-viable primary mode of transit.
I cycle everywhere in Shanghai and I would not even buy a bike if I lived in the US. Motorcycles are for wannabe organ donors. Maybe I’d change my mind if robocars took over from human driven ones but I’d be hesitant about commuting by bike in Ireland, never mind anywhere in the US. Good bike infrastructure is rare.
My first car was $1k bought in Michigan in 2006. It was a massive POS and took $1,500 in repairs to run reliably. I immediately bought a $7k car when I got a job.
I still drive a '97 4runner that I bought for 5k around 2020. I've probably put 5k into repairs. I've spent less on it than anything I could buy new, and it will probably outlast us all. Nearing 300k miles on it now.
Very smart to go with a Toyota! I did the opposite and learned the hard way that the 'discount' for buying American will be paid for in $3k increments whenever it wants over the next few years until your finally give up and just buy the Toyota you should have bought to begin with.
Nah. It's got its original 340 V8, but bored, stroked, ported, forged crank & rods, gear drive, roller cam system. Dynoed at 400 hp.
I can't remember seeing another one (Dodge Challenger) on the road for decades.
My original plan was to swap in a 383 big block. I talked it over with a Mopar motorhead, and he said the big block unbalanced the car, and was difficult to work on because it didn't really fit in the car. He said the 340 would produce a lot of power reliably. I took his advice and didn't regret it. The car is terrifying when one steps hard on the gas.
My newest and most expensive car cost $5k in freedom dollars. It gets the job done. I have an older, more clapped out vehicle that cost $1500, and is in surprisingly decent knick for a 30 year old car, but it does need a paint job and some imminent TLC to keep it from deteriorating. That will cost more than it's worth, but I think it's worth doing in the long run.
> Car debt is terrible. But many people can’t get car debt, because many banks won’t write a $3,000 car loan, much less to someone with unsteady income. The bottom quintile often can’t even reach the $1,000 car - it’s hard to get out of the cycle where you can’t get a job because you don’t have a car. When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them.
Banger post. My first car was a $1200 Geo Prism that I bought through the mechanic shop at the gas station up the street. It was older than my (younger) brother; got a good 5 years out of it before the transmission literally fell apart on Rt 2.
My grandfather bought me a $200 Ford Taurus at a car auction. I hated that car. It was this ugly green color and handled like a boat. But I drove it for many years, mostly to part-time jobs waiting tables or working at a butcher shop when I was in college. It finally met its end one winter in Worcester, Mass when the road salt ate through the flange that held the exhaust pipe on. This happened while idling in the parking lot in front of a Jo-Ann Fabrics store. If you’ve never experienced an unmuffled V6, think twin engine turboprop loud. A kind employee at Jo-Ann came up with a clever solution to hold the exhaust pipe against the chassis using baling wire so that I could at least drive it without the exhaust pipe dragging on the ground. I continued to drive that car, until my neighbors complained that the “tank noise” was waking them up in the morning. I replaced that car with another car that was even worse, but that’s another story.
I am comfortably middle class now. I still buy budget cars because I can’t get past how outrageously expensive most cars are now. But even now I still think, every time I sit in my new (well, three year old) car: wow, this is awesome. I don’t know if my friends think those same thoughts, because I would be honestly a little embarrassed to explain why I feel that way.
I think that anyone who has not experienced the slow churn of driving a car with the engine light on for years, some duct tape holding something in it, is missing nothing. But I still feel like a child with a base modern family car. It is the hint of time travel we are allowed.
It's not fun or bragging-worthy or anything. The "haha the driver door doesn't open" bits are very different from getting stranded in random places. The only good experience is if you manage to fix it for cheap.
I have one piece of junk and one newer (ie 2012) car, so I get to experience the difference every week. Except, the driver side window doesn't work in either car. Wish power windows weren't invented.
It was cheap, but on this car, it was not easy. I tried. I would have no trouble replacing it now, but then, I had no money, no tools, and I could not afford to bring it to a mechanic.
This made me laugh nostalgically. A Geo Prism was one of my first "$1000 cars" as a kid. Fun little car, but once it hit 40 it started shaking like a tree. I always joked that if I drove it on the highway it would shake itself apart around me and I would end up with suspended in air with only a seat and a steering wheel left, looney tunes style, before plummeting to the ground.
I sold it off for a different $1000 car before it happened, but sounds like that's precisely what happened to you!
You get the absolute bare minimum required by your state, it basically just covers the other driver you hit. It's pretty awful since if you are badly injured beyond what their underinsured driver's coverage is for, you're likely not going to get a lot of money. You'll definitely get everything their policy states but the remainder comes out of your own uninsured motorist coverage and health insurance. People that buy bare minimum coverage typically don't have a lot of assets so there'll be nothing to recover from them directly.
I buy bare minimum coverage because it has been my experience that you end up screwed in the event of a collision no matter what kind of insurance you have. Insurance companies are in the business of taking your money now and finding every possible excuse not to give it back later; I'd rather keep it in my own pocket.
This is part of the reason I prefer inexpensive cars: buying only what I can afford to pay for outright means there is no loan which would obligate me to carry a comprehensive insurance policy.
And then we start throwing people in prison because they were too poor to legally go get groceries or go to work.
Car-dependent city design a travesty, grossly hurting the poor. You shouldn't need to pay insurance and operate an expensive machine just to live.
And yet at the same time I see uninsured driving as a really bad and extremely selfish crime. You're risking seriously messing up someone else's life to save some small amount of money every month.
I fully agree with that. It's an extremely selfish crime in many ways and I agree there should be harsh penalties for the crime. But at the same time it's also kind of a failure of society that we've designed most places to live in the US to need a car to survive.
It's not surprising people are willing to do the bad thing when you don't really give them many other good options. We should all be better at empowering people to not have to be in such a situation where the bad option seems like best choice for them in the moment.
If the options were drive and potentially end up in jail or just take the cheap/free reliable bus to get to work, which would they take? If the options are potentially end up in jail or lose your job, which choice do you pick?
> They can walk, ride, bike, phone a friend, relative etc
Yeah they can walk in a city without sidewalks. They can bike in a city without any bike infrastructure. They can ride in a city without busses. Sure sounds effective and safe.
You're blind to reality if you think the average American city and town is actually designed to get by with people walking or biking or riding public transit.
You can't legally drive for whatever reason now. How do you get to your job in Plano? How do you go get groceries? It's a 40 minute bicycle ride each way to the closest grocer. There is no transit.
Yeah, even if they properly enforced this and made cheap car ownership more expensive, people always have their choices and can deal with it. If this makes car-dependent cities non-viable then ok. Probably wouldn't even do that, they'd either find the money or use motorbikes instead.
I'm not. I stated these crimes should be severely punished, and I'm all for cop.cars with ALPRs that match insurance info/expired registrations/etc to make enforcement higher. I'm probably for even more strict enforcement than you're comfortable with. This is a bad crime, and we should do more to make it not happen.
You have no answers for people in that position.
I do.
We shouldn't design our cities and towns like this.
If you find a machine you've been building tends to mangle the operators hands you don't just shrug your shoulders to the problem. You figure out the proper ways to add guards, build in lockouts, make it so people practically can't mess up their hands in normal operation as much as possible.
In the example the machine is the city design. It's the thing we can make better designs so people are less likely to put their hands (or someone else's) into the grinder part. You make it so it never even begins to make sense to drive illegally. Why risk prison time when it's a short bike ride or a reliable bus ride?
> It still doesn’t remove personal responsibility for choosing to drive illegally.
I never, ever, once even slightly suggested otherwise. I've been very consistent: it's a harsh and selfish crime that routinely ruins innocent lives which should have steep penalties and strong enforcement. I just don't like that we then don't actually address why people end up making that decision, we just act like it isn't really a problem at all, meanwhile more and more people drive illegally.
Quit burying your head in the sand to the actual solutions to this problem. You'll have far fewer people stealing food when they're no longer hungry.
It's higher in Los Angeles. And I don't know if they have licenses. What I've heard is if they get in an accident and can't drive away, they run away on foot and report the car stolen.
And I guess they don't get pulled over because there aren't ALPRs or cops are ignoring the hits? I had my insurance lapse for 1 day and they still pulled me over a week later off a stale list, so idk.
I drove a $1000 car for a long time back in my poor days. You could get minimum liability insurance for $50/month or even less. Just whatever you needed to be able to drive legally. Thankfully I was never in any crashes but I always drove with the expectation that crashing would be financially ruinous and tried to be extra careful.
Usually, normal insurance is reasonable, or if it's not, you get liability only because the difference in cost is enough to buy another car after a few years.
Unfortunately there's a fair bit if industry built around charging people who are stretched financially more, but it's possible to avoid that.
Having more wealth if anything has had me buy less insurance. My newer car is liability only. Worst case if it blows up, I can afford a cheap replacement that I've already more than saved up for by not paying full coverage.
Also, that $4K cash for clunkers was a lot. I agree with the author, that would've totally gone into my pocket if they did it today. I still have my old car from college that's worth about $500 now, purchased for $1500, and I don't need it.
If you can afford to eat the loss, don’t insure it.
Obviously insurance companies make money on average for every policy. If they didn’t, they would go bankrupt. So on average, every time you buy insurance, you lose.
So insure only what’s required by law, or things that would throw your life off track if they vanished.
Yep. Which is also why I find vision insurance ridiculous. No it doesn't cover me going blind, it covers a pair of glasses at best, more like 25% of one.
Dental yeah, vision is just a scam. There are also "life insurance" plans that are basically tax-advantage investment/inheritance funds if you have like $50M+.
On the other hand, you likely need more liability insurance with more wealth, at least in the range where this topic of affordable transport comes up.
In an accident, your risk becomes not the cost to restore your ride, but the cost to defend yourself from vampire litigants looking to suck you dry.
Without significant assets, you can just treat bankruptcy as your answer here. With growing assets at middle-class and higher levels, that would be a pretty painful outcome for most.
I suppose, once you are fabulously wealthy, you can wisely be self-insured again, simply trusting that your wealth can defend itself in a sustainable way?
My insurance is getting to the point where I might do the same. My car is worth maybe a third of what it was new, and my monthly insurance bill is the same, it's nuts. I may go with a significantly higher deductible as a compromise.
Also be aware that even if you buy comprehensive insurance for an old car (don't do it), they won't actually cover anything useful.
If there is an accident, the insurance company will say: Your car is only worth $700 per blue book value and your deductible is $500 so here's $200 and your title is now totaled.
Buy liability only and self-insure for any damage (or just buy a new beater as needed).
You can't legally forego insurance (at least in the USA). But comprehensive insurance is silly to pay for an old car so you buy only liability so it's a lot cheaper.
I live in the west. I also have an excellent driving record and drive a small econobox.
Here's an interesting story that gave me greater understanding of how insurance is priced. Years ago, I worked at a place where I lived 5 miles away as the crow flies. However, due to geography, the only way to get between my work and my home was by car, using one of the most dangerous freeways in my state.
I got tired of the commute and moved closer to work, close enough that I didn't have to use the freeway (or even drive unless I was lazy) anymore. I reported the change of my residence to my car insurance company, and they cut my premium by a third.
They didn't say why, but I'm certain the reason was that I didn't take that freeway 10 times per week anymore.
I guess it can be like the Terry Pratchett boot theory a bit. But yeah even among your circle, you need to be careful. I know somebody who got a junk car for a bad price because it was from somebody in their circle and everyone else vouched for the seller.
Very few people buying a new car keep it long enough to make it cheaper than buying $5-10k cars.
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.
The question isn't so much how long it lasts until the engine explodes, it's how expensive is maintenance. That's the boot theory part. If you can't save up enough for the $10k car that lasts 15 years (though you mentioned a timing belt replacement and on some cars that's a few thousand $, ask me how I know...) and instead can only afford to keep buying $1000 cars, that could turn into a slew of smaller fixes that add up to a lot more than the car was initially bought for.
I'm also a bit surprised you'd buy a new car. Off-lease is much cheaper and they're still fairly new ish.
How do you expect their material conditions to improve if nobody attempts to get more stuff to them?
I doubt the "HN crowd" was about to do anything, but it'd be better if someone saw some sort of market opportunity here. It sounds pretty miserable not being able to get to a well paid job. I personally appreciate all the people who lent me money and sold me cars. It enabled a lot of income for me, over a lifetime.
Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale.
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).
In the long term, yes, but infrastructure projects are famously drawn out in the US due to meddling from NIMBYs, companies puppeting sham environmental groups, and third parties forcing their way in and holding projects hostage unless they get a slice of the pie among other things.
It’s a battle worth fighting but public transport infrastructure isn’t going to happen overnight and people will need cars that won’t bankrupt them until then.
The advantage of busses and bikes are that they can use the same roads we already built for cars. We don't need to build new infrastructure to make busses and bikes much better, we just need to limit car access. That can be done by significantly lowering speed limits for private vehicles, tolling a lot more roads and streets, and in cases where we can (especially in cities) ban personal vehicles entirely.
Trains need infrastructure, but a lot of the train infrastructure is already there, it just needs to be repaired and modernized. The USA freight network is one of the most comprehensive train networks in the world. The problem is that is has gone through decades of neglect, and trains are required to crawl through a large portion of the network so as to not derail. Urgent modernization of the rail network could happen in years instead of decades.
The things you’re describing aren’t “alternatives to driving.” They perform a different function. Most Americans don’t aspire to live like Chinese people packed into high rises with 0.8 kids taking the train to work. They want to live where they want to live, then take their 2-3 kids to school and themselves to work 10-15 miles away without having to plan their lives around a public transit schedule.
I'm American, and I don't normally drive, because I use busses, bikes, and trains to get to my destinations. I sold my last (hopefully ever) car over a year ago.
I'm sorry to shatter the dreams of most Americans, but the world has finite resources. Buying a car when you're poor is hard, because cars are expensive, because they are extremely resource demanding. Even with all the subsidies drivers receive, they still usually struggle with the cost.
By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
> By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
I go to Japan once or twice a year. Even in Japan, many people take regional rail or (gasp!) busses, and those don't run every 5 minutes.
A majority of American households (58.4%) are childless and ~80% of Americans live in urban areas per the US Census Bureau. I think you might be misreading the desires of most Americans, based on the data.
I agree Americans love their cars, but will they love them with oil prices above $100-$120/barrel persistently? To be determined.
> Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.
> According to the 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, approximately 286 million Americans (roughly 94 percent of the population) live in metropolitan statistical areas. Just 17.7 million people, about 6 percent, live entirely outside any metro or micropolitan area.
> The popular image of America as a land of small towns and open plains is, statistically speaking, a minority experience. The story of 21st-century America is, above all, a story of cities.
The census definition of “urban area” means nothing. I technically live in an “urban area” according to the census definition, but there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me.
The same is true for the definition of “childless” people. It counts my parents, who don’t have children living at home, but have my kids coming over to their house multiple times per week. Only 15% of women never have children. Most people arrange their living circumstances with the goal of eventually having kids. And once the kids grow up and leave, most people want to stay in the same area.
>Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids
Your 57% lacks relevance to the current conversation because it is 57% of a small
percentage of Americans.
42 to 43% of Americans are either under 18 or a parent of an under-18-yo. Plus of course some outside that group will soon become parents. And some are empty-nesters who prefer to keep on living in the neighborhood they lived in when they were raising their children.
A growing gap between how many kids people want and how many they have militates against copying the dense housing patterns of Asian countries that have the lowest birth rates in the world.
Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility. And realized fertility is trending lower globally, as shown by my numerous citations. I’m willing to bet on this if you want, as a demographic scholar.
> Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility.
Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. What’s your point?
People are having less kids because women didn’t want them before, they just have the power to not have them now. This is covered extensively in the citations I provided in the comment you replied to. Housing might be a component, but it is not the root cause. Children are a luxury good now, not an extra hand on the farm.
~40% of annual pregnancies in both the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively), so even with fertility rates down in teens and the 21-40 cohort, we still have a long way to go in preventing unwanted pregnancies and children (which translates into a further declining fertility rate curve forward looking, model accordingly).
I assist thousands of folks a year seeking permanent birth control obtain it, mostly the childfree but occasionally someone who already has a kid or two, ama; this is the cheapest, easiest win as it relates to avoiding suffering around unwanted children, and the emotional, time, and monetary costs of unwanted children at scale is simply too high. The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate.
You’re overlooking the Gallup studies showing that the desired fertility rate has been stable at 2.7, well above the replacement rate.
> The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate
It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
> It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
The only culture whose fertility rate isn't declining and converging around 0.5-1 is those in Israel, and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so due to political winds changing.
Good luck to those desiring "children confering high social status" as inflation continues to increase and the cost of everything increases long into the future due to climate change and structural demographics shrinking working age populations globally. Being poor sucks, everyone figures this out eventually, and the future will not be as nice as the recent past was. Kids have a cost, can those who want them for status afford them? We'll find out soon enough.
Muslim Americans are among the most highly educated demographics in the U.S., and Mormons are around the average. So it’s definitely possible without turning the clock back before women had education and choices.
> and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so…
Hard to take you seriously as a “researcher” when you apply antisemitic tropes to math. Israel’s GDP is about $700 billion, and growing at 3% (that’s $20 billion) a year. US aid is about $3 billion a year.
It’s one thing to mime the meme for shits and giggles, but you’re now trying to use that in a rational argument.
Never happens on the timescale of the next decade, maybe two. How far along is California high speed rail? When did they start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail (construction began in 2015 and it won’t be operational until at least 2031, 16 years later) If you break ground today, you won’t see new public infrastructure operational for at least a decade. Brightline light rail was built in Florida and is approaching insolvency, even with 3M riders per year.
We could provide subsidies to move the disadvantaged to major urban cores with public transportation systems, I’d support that. Have to find the funds to do it though. Cheaper than trying to build anything new in the US for sure.
I hear this a lot, but it’s not an excuse for never starting. Amsterdam started taking their non-car infrastructure seriously in the 1970s and now it’s seen as an example for the rest of the world.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
Asking to see a realistic roadmap and timeline is being a realist, not a defeatist. If Amsterdam started in the 1970s, that’s fifty years ago. Maybe we can make progress by the 2060s-2070s? Or we can just wait for China to manufacture all the EVs the world needs. Which is more likely to occur first?
Consider the US has $40T in debt and no will to raise taxes at this time, and therefore no will to spend on public infrastructure projects. Where will the capital come from?
How and when will we start? How many elections need to occur to appropriate funding? How much of the US electorate has to turn over for the right people to be elected to appropriate funding? Until shovels are in the ground, it’s vaporware and dreams.
It doesn’t have to be a massive nationwide project on par with the national highway project. It can start with local communities.
The mayor of Carmel, IN thought traffic circles were better than intersections and wanted more mixed use development. They have that now, nearly every intersection in the city has been replaced over time as they were due for routine work.
In Detroit they are in the process of building out a 29 mile greenway around the city.
These city level projects are a lot more important than the national ones, when it comes to reducing car traffic in cities and having an impact on people’s most frequent trips.
Seeing this at a local level could inspire more rail connections between cities, which could also come from the private sector. We have already seen a couple examples of this.
For anything funded by the federal government, you’re right. They have a huge mess on their hands, and need to get serious about cleaning it up. They have no business kicking of any major public works projects until that happens (though that has never stopped them in the past). But at a local level, things can still move forward and we are seeing it happen to some extent, though it often still feels more like a hobby than a firm conviction.
> Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale
No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban electronics in cars so you can actually hold onto them and repair them yourself.
The US lost that global argument when it decided financialization mattered more than manufacturing. A majority of Americans cannot afford their basic needs to be met on their income, it’s not “a bit more expensive,” and it’s for legacy auto profits, not to maintain domestic production capacity.
No one is banning electronics in cars, and US legacy auto will never catch up. They made their choice to prioritize profits over investment.
> While the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—accounted for 92 percent of domestic auto share in 1965, this share would fall by half, to 46 percent, by 2015, and to 38 percent by 2024.
> From 1995 to 2022, China’s share of global automotive vehicle output skyrocketed eightfold, from 3 to 25 percent, while the U.S. share slid from 23 to 14 percent.
> In 2007, cars sold in the United States contained 38 percent U.S.- or Canadian-made content on average; that portion declined to 18 percent by 2023.
(BYD sells more EVs internationally than Ford does in total, and they intend to be the largest global automaker in the next five years)
No sane poor person would buy a used Mercedes. Parts and repair would cost more than the car. The only people that would think a $1000 Mercedes is worth it would be rich.
Depends on the Mercedes. There was a time where Mercedes made cars that had a reputation for reliability similar to Toyota's today, and those cars are still fairly reasonable to keep running. The problem is that they're now becoming collectors items. Anything from the last 25 years though? Best to look elsewhere.
A W123 mercedes (late 1970s-early 1980s) is an exceptionally well built car. Reliable, easy to work on yourself if you're handy, parts not expensive. At this point they're getting hard to find and prices for decent ones are climbing but for a long time they were a great car and easy to find for low thousands.
You could say similar things about older BMWs. People leave notes on my 2004 Honda CR-V asking if I want to sell. A Honda civic I put on Craigslist took less than hour to sell. Repairability of any used car is becoming increasing problematic. Nursing an old automobile past its prime is becoming a lost art:)
I've owned two Hondas and I would not touch another one. Both had transmission failures at under 200K miles. They actually are designed so that you can't change the filter without removing the transmision from the vehicle and splitting the case. I will say that the engines seem good.
What about selling busses and trains, and buildings bike lanes and train tracks? Loans and cars aren't the solution to loans and cars, but there are solutions.
I lived in a place for a few years that had a free public transportation network. I can’t tell you how liberating that was, because it meant that I could get to lots of places without owning a vehicle. They even had bike racks on the busses, which meant that you could easily cover the last mile.
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.
Plus, money isn’t always the reason people can’t or don’t drive. People may have disabilities that prevent them from driving. Heck, some people just don’t like driving. Improving public transit, biking, and pedestrian infrastructure solves most of these issues, and it’s frustrating how car-centric the US is in most places.
Is this sarcasm? Serious question. At least half of HN is autistic. Anywhere there’s friction there’s a market opportunity. Everyone knows that. So this must be sarcasm.
Wow! This didn't last long on the front page. Strange - I thought it was an honest and informative little article.
I noticed it on the front page. An hour later, it's on page 3.
<edit>
Now I'm just curious to see how fast the downward trajectory is on this currently 70-post article is. Still in the 1-2 hour range and now it is on page 4 of HN.
Buying a beat-up used car is risky. They are cheap for a reason, they have repairs that cost thousands. And cascading repairs, you don't know what else is wrong until the first problem is fixed, and the first problem itself is $3000 - $5000. The article has anecdotes that worked out for some people, but it doesn't work out for most people. It is like buying a lottery ticket.
Buying a new cheap car is the safest, and I'm sure there are always some models available under 20K.
Poor people (or even non-poor people) can buy the cheapest transportation available. US used to have the cheapest cars in the world. Its completely changed now, all you need to do is to ask your administrators to let the manufacturers from China bring them in.
Ask your admin to allow cheap cars/KEI/golf and work with your local city to build walk/bike/golf-cart trials. Its a one time cost, you can make transportation cheap permanently.
> I'm sure there are always some models available under 20K
Since you are sure, can you name a few?
You can't because none exist. There are no new cars in the USA for less than 20K.
The alternatives offered here are nonsensical. Where in the US does one buy this youtube solar car or KEI cars? Nowhere, that is where. They are not sold in the USA.
Golf carts are legal on hardly any roads so that is another non-starter unless you live in a neigborhood where they are allowed and never plan to go anywhere outside of it.
Cycling is great, that is the only practical suggestion on the list. But of course a bike is not a car so if someone actually needs a car, a bike is not a car.
For anyone poor who needs cheap transportation, old beater cars are the best.
Don't have to be poor either, for anyone who doesn't want to throw good money away at depreciation, old cars are the best deal. As an engineer in Silicon Valley I could technically afford many kinds of expensive cars but I've yet to ever spend more than 20K on any car or truck. Buy used, keep forever, that's the best.
If that is being sold as new, it is a leftover model that has been sitting in the dealer lot for a year or so, depreciated accordingly.
A quick search shows me a bunch of 2025 Nissan Versas for sale between 16K-17K, so someone buying this dealer leftover for 19K gets an instant depreciation of ~2.5K.
Second, with the exception of food, you get what you pay for. The housing is of poor quality compared to what you get in the west—it’d never pass inspection there. Everything is made with cheap materials. The cars are just decent enough but also aren’t salable in the west—they wouldn’t meet crash safety standards (no airbags, insufficient bumpers, etc.). Think 1970s-80s econobox.
Third, the government is more than willing to allow increased housing density. Towers are popping up everywhere. But the transportation infrastructure is still terrible, traffic is congested, and commutes are long. It can take over an hour to move 10km there.
> The housing is of poor quality compared to what you get in the west—it’d never pass inspection there. Everything is made with cheap materials.
All the houses are built with concrete. They are pretty much indestructible. You could say India has the worst products/services in the world, but housing might not be one of them.
> The cars are just decent enough but also aren’t salable in the west—they wouldn’t meet crash safety standards (no airbags, insufficient bumpers, etc.). Think 1970s-80s econobox.
> Third, the government is more than willing to allow increased housing density. Towers are popping up everywhere. But the transportation infrastructure is still terrible, traffic is congested, and commutes are long. It can take over an hour to move 10km there.
Mahindra is selling cars in Australia but they’re not the same models sold in India. Same names but different specs.
Fair enough that the housing is made from concrete but the quality is still pretty poor. The foundations are uneven, as are the floors. The doors, windows, flooring, plumbing fixtures, etc. are, for the most part, cheap junk. The same is happening all around the world as builders race to the bottom, but India was pretty far down there. They’re in good company though; the same is true of all poorer nations.
I'd dispute buying a new car is cheapest, having bought a number of cheap and one new car. The cheapest is probably a basic reliable model, about 15 years old. Toyota corolla type stuff. If something does pack up you can usually fix them quite cheap. My ~$700 corolla hardly cost anything to run and lasted about six years before needing scrapping.
New cars are nice - shiny and reliable but you pay a bit. It can also be risky from the financial point of view if you buy on credit.
A tip for buying cheap ones is buy off someone wealthy who doesn't care about the money from the old car and would otherwise get like $0 from a dealer.
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.”
Nobody is selling you a used Lexus or Toyota or Honda for cheap. It is usually a nondescript brand and model, like a geo metro or a model with known reliability issues.
Buying a Lexus would be a very stupid idea. You don't buy a luxury/premium model for cheap. Way too much gimmicky stuff/gadgets that can break and parts price are way too high.
When you buy sub $2000 car, you look for models that were already in the relatively affordable range and have been best sellers of their category: good knowledge from mechanics, good and affordable spare parts availability.
A Lexus is just a Toyota with nicer materials on the inside. They use Toyota parts that cost Toyota prices, they aren’t out to gouge you on parts like European manufacturers. Sometimes Lexus vehicles are cheaper than a similar Toyota, a Lexus GX460 costs less than a similar vintage Toyota 4Runner or Toyota Landcruiser.
Before getting a job in software, I used to buy cars from insurance auctions. Plenty of cars that run and drive end up there for various reason and if you were patient, you could get running and driving cars for $1000 or less (This was 7+ years ago). The catch is that you don't know what you're getting. You either have to have be mechanically inclined or know somebody who is to walk the lot and check the cars out before you bid.
Case and point, I bought a car that was fine when we inspected it, but when they picked it up with the forklift they knocked a hole in the oil pan, and we had to get it towed. $100 for a new oil pan (for the wrong year lol) and I got many years out of it.
This using fork lifts to move cars is crazy. When the car runs why tf do it?! Seen many YT channels show it happening and there is almost always damage.
Liability. Those auctions dont sell "cars", they sell _item X as is_. Forklift workers are certified and operation is insured for forklifting.
If it fits, it's not the wrong year. I once put an exhaust manifold from a 95 Civic into a 98 Civic (replacing its cracked one that was filling the cabin with toxic exhaust fumes). I had gone to a Honda dealer to inquire about a new one; it cost too much, but the guy gave me some free nuts for bolting on a used one before I went on my merry way. Did the work myself. I seem to remember those things have two oxygen sensors that had to be moved from old to new.
Yep, upstream and downstream O2 sensors. The '96 I drove in college developed cracks around both. My cheapie self just patched them with JB Weld
> If it fits, it's not the wrong year. I once put an exhaust manifold from a 95 Civic into a 98 Civic
No such thing as wrong year nor wrong model, or even wrong brand as long as it works!
Honda in particular lots of parts interchange (at least used to) between Civics and Accords and other models.
I had a fuel pump die on an older BMW on 101 (Silicon Valley near googleplex). Late on a Saturday, could not get the BMW part. Found an Audi fuel pump which was similar enough, installed it on the side of the highway and worked fine. Ran for many years, still going when I sold that car.
Cops showed up to harass us about working on the car on the side of the highway.. Fortunately my friend is a big talker and kept them entertained while I finished the installation and started the car.
No such thing as wrong year nor wrong model, or even wrong brand as long as it works!
Or even make! Many manufacturers use the same supplier for various parts. The lock actuator on my 2010 dodge pickup is also used in Fords.
There's an incredible amount of value in simply not worrying if your car will run when you need it to. Cortisol is one hell of a drug.
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. It might even be worth engaging with less scrupulous financiers. Stability in transportation unlocks a lot of opportunities.
> There's an incredible amount of value in simply not worrying if your car will run when you need it to.
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.
Oh, I read that quote the opposite way (wrongly, I think now) –
> > There's an incredible amount of value in simply not worrying if your car will run when you need it to.
> True, being able to know for sure you can get to work (or wherever important) is a huge peace of mind.
If you don't worry about it not because you trust it, but because you just think you'll take it as it comes and don't particularly care if it doesn't start one day, there's also a lot of value in that you could save a lot on used prices and servicing!
While I have always tried to live my life by your assumed philosophy, I think they were simply saying that since (on average) a more expensive vehicle often means a more mechanically sound vehicle less likely to break down. It’s not just the peace in being less likely to have to deal with that situation, it is the stress when it occurs. If you have to buy a $1000 car, you aren’t likely to have savings sitting around available to you to fix your vehicle when something needs replacement every month or two. Knowing that entire situation is constantly looming is just another slice of the high background stress pie. Newer (more expensive) vehicles will tend to have more wear left on operational parts, so they tend to have less mechanical breakdowns and less parts that need be replaced. Many are the breakdowns that “could” happen with any vehicle, but a lot more are just parts wearing out from age; brakes here, CVs there, gas pump one day, a battery another. They all add up quickly, especially for someone who can’t fix their own car (a single mother of two just trying to get to her jobs, for example), especially when it not only costs you money, you may not even get paid because you couldn’t make it to work and had to call out (and if you’re lucky, don’t get fired because it has happened too much). That entire situation isn’t stress that you can just casually ignore — or at least, that was my experience while being poor.
> to fix your vehicle when something needs replacement every month or two
You'd have to be spectacularly unlucky for that, many sigmas away from the bell curve of average car experience.
Having owned lots of older cars, typically repairs are once every few years and are pretty cheap.
If you do get unlucky and blow an engine or similarly high cost repair, sell it for parts and buy another cheap car.
>At least warranty covered it.
How come the warranty did not cover other cases you listed (and did not give you a loaner/paid for a rental)?
Two of the three warranty covered it. I don't remember why the ECU repair was not fully covered by warranty (that was over 25 years ago) but I do remember the sting of paying for it since we were younger and poorer at the time.
I've never had a dealer provide any loaner car. The best I've seen is they give a coupon for $xx off a rental from the car rental place next door.
>I've never had a dealer provide any loaner car.
That's strange. Even when I had a Hyundai, I would get a loaner/rental from the dealer and it was not some exceptional dealer as I moved across the country with that vehicle so I dealt with two different dealers (and the second one has not even sold me a car).
Insurance kills this plan every time.
Not even close. For example insurance on my early 90s Mazda is $192. Insurance on my partner's three year old VW is almost $900. I could have a fleet of four older Mazdas and still be cheaper to insure.
I assume the difference here is that the newish VW is all-risk covered (theft, damage to own car, etc) while the Mazda is covered for liability only and that it would be possible to insure the newer car for liability only for about the same amount as you pay for the Mazda.
Technically it has comprehensive as well although it's a moot point. My deductible is $1000 and they'll just say the car is worth less than that, so they'll never pay anything.
I guess I should reduce it to liability only but it'll probably save me like $2, so haven't bothered.
I used to use the two car method. I was single and carefree, so I had a Corvette and a hot rod El Camino. Perfect for a young shade tree mechanic.
Then I was taking a long trip in the El Camino and overheated, cracking the heads. While the machine shop work was underway, one of the half-shafts driving the Corvette broke loose, severely beating the underside of the car.
It was bitterly cold January, and I was left going to work on a bicycle.
I sold both classics and bought a new Saturn. Much less style, but much more reliability.
People say buying used car is a lottery, but so is buying a new released car model. I've seen people having to send their brand new shiny car to the shop on a regular basis. The odds of getting a good experience are higher than blindly buying a second hand car with unknow history but not necessarily much better than buying a 20y old car (whose typical failure points are well known by that point) with complete documented history and knowing a good maintenance shop.
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 think you greatly overestimate how many 8-10 year old EVs will actually require replacement batteries. Barring a few models with poor engineering choices, most cars will still have 80% of their capacity after 10 years and won't have the downsides of having a 10 year old ICE engine with a variable record of maintenance.
Perhaps, but remember that people have taken cues from their most-used battery-powered device. In this case, their phone (or laptop).
A degraded battery in these devices leads to things like random power-offs or dropping to 1% randomly (the display does not correct itself as it assumes it's safer to round down), particularly when it's cold. When it shuts itself down, it clearly displays that it has power remaining, but the device communicates that it thinks it knows better than you.
It is this bad software (and bad hardware) in these computing devices that ultimately what has led to EVs- new and especially used- being a tough sell far before the first one was ever released. The technology has proven fundamentally untrustworthy in low-stakes applications; why should it now be trusted in high-stakes applications?
(The answer so far has been "give them an utterly ridiculous horsepower figure", which did work, but it turns out normal cars can do that pretty easily too, and they're cheaper.)
Is an EV with 80% battery still usable? I ask because phones with 80% batteries are practically e-waste, or urgently needing a replacement. It's not a fair comparison but that degraded battery in a phone is a problem, because the phone still requires a certain amount of power that the battery now struggles to provide and overheats, in many cases, causing secondary damage to other components (like the display).
Phone batteries have relatively little margin. If it lasts barely a full day at full capacity, going down to 80% means you can no longer reliably say "I'll charge it overnight".
A car battery that lasted 300km new but now only 200km is still entirely adequate for a commuter with a 25km typical commute, and occasional 75km days out.
EVs that are 10 years old now will have a lower range than current models, AFAIK, so 80% of that might still be limiting. They will also be slower charging.
Very true on both accounts (I own a 12-year old Tesla) but for vast majority of EV owners this is simply not an issue.
Do the vast majority never drive a long distance? If you use a car purely for short journeys maybe. Is this common in the US? Everywhere I have lived most people do atleast some long (i.e. an ICE car needs refuelling at some point) some long trips.
I have friends with an EV that just rent an ICE car for road trips.
exactly this. EVs are definitely not for road-trip-every-week families, I rent a car 4-5x per year (my other car is EV as well)
> 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.
Enough people believe this that such cars are the best deal right now, by far. You're more likely to have to replace a Toyota Engine by 200,000 miles (4%) than a Tesla Battery (3%). As long as the battery has liquid cooling (aka not the Leaf) and is relatively large (small batteries do more cycles per mile) and you do a battery health check at time of purchase to look for abuse, the battery will likely outlast the rest of the car, unless you're doing Taxi type milage. In which case you need to ensure you're getting an LFP battery, which should last close to a million miles.
Even Leaf batteries can be fine. A used Leaf might be the best deal going right now due to everyone being afraid of the battery, but if it hasn't been fast charged a ton its fine. Specifically the second gen "plus" models are great due to the larger battery meaning they have less wear.
Its also, by far, the easiest EV to swap a battery on yourself. It might be the only one you can reasonably do in your driveway. As its 8 bolts, 3 plugs, and a quick ECU flash to get a new one going. Its also cheaper ($8k last I looked, for the 62kw model) than any other EV to swap the battery due to the lack of cooling.
Not the perfect EV, but maybe the perfect shade tree mechanics EV.
EV batteries are pretty reliable, however the suspension system and wheel bearings and physical brakes are more likely to be neglected because it sees less shop time despite usually weighing more.
I think most of the bodies of EVs will rust out before most batteries are actually too degraded to use. Just like many ICE cars.
Do your research first, talk to a mechanic friend or relative about what cars are reliable. Get a late model of that or an older one with few miles. Stay away from CVT transmissions, avoid the first model of a car, go with a model that’s been around for years (plenty of parts and bugs worked out). Get the most basic version, and go for reliability over style.
The worst part is dealing with dealers.
In the US new cars come with a warranty and a lemon law. So if it goes to shop on a regular basis it can be replaced/refunded. And if it needs to go to the shop it's free and you get a loaner/free rental while it's there. Nothing like that is possible with a 20 y.o. car.
While it is free under warranty it is still a huge annoyance.
Compared to what, a used car? Certainly there is no better service for a used car out of warranty.
I as mentionning the odds of having issues and the myth of new = painless experience. Brand new models often have issues, hence my recommendation for models that have been in the market for several years already where early issue have been solved already.
You're so concerned about the odds of a used battery going bad and yet bought a used car with a CVT. Interesting life choices.
I'd never buy a car with a traditional CVT. Used or new. They're so incredibly unreliable over time.
I wouldn't mind picking up a used EV, assuming I can get a state of health report on the battery. Something usually pretty easy to do.
If you don't rag on them and get the oil changed on schedule I haven't seen too many Nissan CVT problems. The ones I do are driven by people with a lead foot and always breaking traction and full throttle accelerating often.
I usually just tell people to get their cvt fluid changed on schedule or sooner because its a steel belt and it does wear and shed metal particles.
> I haven't seen too many Nissan CVT problems
I've seen about a dozen, and I only know about a dozen Nissan owners. In fact, I've yet to meet a long time Nissan CVT owner who didn't have significant CVT related issues, even if they allegedly did the maintenance on time. Because...
> its a steel belt and it does wear and shed metal particles.
They're so worried about the wear on a battery meanwhile this has a part that's constantly producing metal wear particles inside the transmission practically by design. The transmission will fail, and it'll probably be pretty destructive when it goes. At least from the dozen or so examples I've personally seen.
Well, you don't know me, but I can assure there exists at least one person (me), who bought a Nissan Micra CVT in 1993 and still uses it, and they had never had any issue with the CVT. The rest of the car obviously shows its age, but CVT has never been a problem.
I mean engines got metal-on-metal wear too, it is just taken care of by filtering and frequent oil changes. The cvt has that too, but under slightly better conditions so it has a longer oil lifespan. But it still needs replacement and filters, and people don't account for the amount of usage outside of "average" usage.
The manual may say replace your cvt fluid at 100k miles, but that average includes all the old grannies that you regularly pass on your way to work. For some drivers it should be replaced twice as often due to driving patterns, just like engine oil should, but that isn't well advertised unfortunately and I think it leads to a lot of failures.
But the wear caused from dirty transmission oil increases exponentially so there is a point where you can go from "transmission is perfectly fine" to "the transmission is totally fucked" pretty rapidly. I could see how that is seen as a flaw still, but others could argue that it is simply a maintenance issue. Just like the many engines where timing belt failures can cause engine destruction.
> engines got metal-on-metal wear too
If they're operating properly there should be almost no actual metal on metal contact. "Fluid bearings" and all. It's an important aspect to how long the life of modern engines are. If you actually have metal on metal on most engine components it won't last much longer.
A CVT requires metal on metal friction to function at its most basic level. Your transmission is ultimately a war component, designed to fail.
You might as well argue the same about batteries. If you don't overly rely on DCFC, if you don't discharge them too much, if you stay in the 20-80% range mostly, if you're not constantly doing high-amperage pulls ("If you don't rag on them"), etc. Take care of it and it'll last a long time. Stress it out all the time and it'll wear out quick.
I'm not arguing batteries aren't an expensive wear component. They are, and they are largely the wear component to care about on a used one. I'm just pointing out CVT are also an expensive wear component. It's a double standard to be OK with one while acting like the other is some odd uncommon issue. But in the end one you can usually plug in an OBD reader in and know the actual health of the battery, the other requires you trusting the owner cared and that they and you aren't just unlucky or have an extensive tear down from a mechanic.
I knew that CVT on mine would be reliable as long as periodic oil change has been done in due terms which was the case. I wouldn't have bought it had I not have access to the complete service history.
> I knew that CVT on mine would be reliable
It's a CVT on a car. It's unreliable. That's it's nature.
I wouldn't have bought it straight from the factory given how much of a piece of junk they are.
There's an incredible amount of value in having a job. In caring about your job. In having a job where it matters if you perform well or not. In being in a position to engage with less scrupulous financiers. In stability. In having opportunities in the first place.
For me a loan would be far more stressful than fixing a 20 year old car, but I have worked for myself for 15 years so my priorities are probably skewed
Hubberman says spiking cortisol in the morning is good. So the $1000 car can solve that problem.
Huberman also said it was good to gargle and swallow a glass of water in the morning before brushing your teeth.
I think that was the last episode I listened to...
My wife was from Reno, I was from NY. The week before we got married (in 1996) we were out there and her sister lent us a 1979 F150 at about 2O0k miles —- 3-on-the-tree, no air, AM radio, lap belts. The passenger door would fly open on left turns unless it was locked. I nearly lost my brother when I picked him up at the airport and forgot to warn him.
Maybe cause I was about to get married but I loved that truck.
I always wanted to try a three one the tree, just cause they were so different. Alas all the cars I've ever owned were 5 or 6 speeds. Today I drive an EV with no gears. Maybe someday a collector will trust me with his car - but I wouldn't myself with something classic.
We (mostly) restored a barn-find 1959 Mercedes 220S (Ponton) cabriolet. Manual transmission with selector on the tree (but four speed I think).
Honestly, it felt different for about a half hour, then just fades into the background.
I drive an 04 Civic I got from a coworker for $2000 seven years ago. One door handle is missing, the trunk leaks a bit when it rains, some of the ceiling fabric is starting to droop, the clear coat is mostly peeled off, first gear requires some finesse, and if you roll down one of the windows too far, it's going to take two people and 45 minutes to get it back up.
But it drives, requires only the usual regular maintenance, and isn't tracking me. I'm going to drive it until it turns to dust beneath me (or more likely, like the article says, when repairs get more costly than what it's worth).
> when repairs get more costly than what it's worth
I've never understood why that would be a relevant criteria?
If the car is cheap enough, it's easy for any repair to cost more. So what?
The comparison to make is not whether the repair cost or car value is higher.
The interesting comparison is whether repairing this car I already own is cheaper or more expensive than selling it getting a different one. Nearly always (unless catastrophic failure like blown engine etc) it is cheaper to repair the one I already own.
"Than what it's worth" is basically a shorthand for "if the cost of repairs is more than what it'd cost to buy a less problematic car, it probably makes more sense to just buy a less problematic car with that money"
I have never owned a vehicle newer than 20 years old, I have just never seen the point of doing so. The financial math just never worked out.
With that said, I have always done my research and managed to obtain vehicles which, after maybe some high-importance fixes in the beginning, managed to last another 5-20 years without any other major work done to them.
Hell, aside from oil changes and minor fixes that I did entirely by myself, I got my last car for nearly free and it lasted me a good decade before some idiot with a jacked-up pickup - he couldn’t even see me behind him - backed into me even though I was laying on the horn like crazy.
Besides, anything prior to 2006 is going to be much easier to fix, does not have DRM, and will not spy on you unless it comes with OnStar.
Honestly, the biggest pain point these days is the lack of a true manual clutch, with the full three pedals on the floor. These vehicles are becoming distressingly rare.
Growing up, my Dad would buy cars from bulletin board ads where he worked at NASA. I was third of six kids and we had a fleet of as many as six cars at a time at our house. Oil changes were unnecessary, but adding oil every tank of gas was common.
I'm driving a 2005 Toyota Matrix with 230K miles that I bought new in 2004. It's just recently needed oil added before an oil change is due.
Interesting. I'm far from poor, but that's pretty much exactly how I buy cars, and I have never regretted it. The couple of times that I bought more expensive cars, I've regretted it. The only time I'd take out a loan to buy a car is in an emergency situation. That's happened once, and is one of the purchases I regretted.
The car I currently drive is a 2007 economy model I purchased for $2,000 with ~150,000 miles on it. I've had it for almost 10 years now, and it remains solid and reliable. I am meticulous about regular maintenance, though.
Are you able to do your own work though? I use and prefer old cars, but I know I won't always be able to because I won't personally be able to deal with the issues on my own.
I can do the basics like oil changes. I don't, though, because it's worth it to me to pay my mechanic to do all the maintenance. I'd do the same if the car were new.
How did you find a reliable mechanic like this?
I asked everyone I knew who they used, paid attention to which ones people had stuck with the longest, then tried those ones out by getting oil changes from them. Then out of the ones that I had good vibes from, I chose the one that was physically closest to where I live.
To get back to the essay's point, car know-how has traditionally been a blue-collar preserve. YouTube and a bespoke forum for each make and model changed all that. Fixing and maintaining a beater is a source of pride, particularly for the well-heeled who, like Zuck's bow hunting foray, will go out of their way to simulate a more rustic existence.
I honestly don't know what the essay's point is. It starts off promising, gives good general advice about looking at friend of friends to finding these cars and looking past cosmetic issues. But it stops there.
Okay, I can ignore things like the car doesn't look nice or doors don't lock. But what should I actually look for? What are the things I shouldn't compromise about? Is there some useful metric to calculate useful life of the car? Rules of thumb for issues that may arise, like bad brakes, tires, engine noise, etc? What are things I can fix myself?
In the course of my work I deal with organizations who sell cars out of impound lots. There is a whole capitalistic recycling industry of buying junked cars and reassembling them into functioning vehicles again.
Interestingly, a fair portion of junked cars get shipped overseas where the labor is very, very low cost and high tech, cheap labor chop shops in places like India or in some countries in Africa will have highly skilled workers basically cut out crumple zones and restore completely totaled vehicles into new looking cars and turn around and sell them. This would never be viable here in the States because of the labor cost, but when you are paying someone $1 USD a day to do highly skilled and technical labor like this it becomes very viable.
Another popular tactic where I live in Texas is to steal a car and drive it south of the border and strip it. Then buy a junked car same make and model with a clean VIN. Then ship that clean VIN second car south of the border as well and rebuild it with the stolen parts and ship it back over for resale.
One solution that exists in third world is motorbikes. New motorbikes cost ~$1000. These are perfectly acceptable, ideal for the western economies, if there are enough of them on the road, it will get safer. One bike in between 10,000 cars is hard to see, but enough of them create bike-awareness.
China's EV cars are known, but it also has 350 million electric motorbikes.
You keep quoting prices that make no sense in 2026 such as cars under 20k. See https://www.theautopian.com/americas-cheapest-new-car-now-co...
Please link to some prices for motorcycles that can go 75 miles per hour (necessary on the highway) that cost < $1k. 5 seconds of googling says they start at around $5k. I have a moto so I agree with the premise broadly that more should consider them. They are not as useful in all weather and of course there is risk of injury which most poor people will have no ability to pay for in our US health care situation...
You are right (and other comments). I still have last years info when there were a few models available for under 20K. I guess with inflation, the cheapest 2026 cars seem to be 22K-ish. Some 2025 models are available for ~19K, but they won't last long.
They will not get as safe as cars. They are inherently dangerous, it's like taking a car and removing every safety feature. Removing doors, windows and belts. There's a reason that there is a legal requirement in many countries to wear a helmet.
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.
I think if anything, this shows that cheap cars aren't that bad of a solution. Motorbikes are viable, and people still go for the cheap cars.
My honda NC750 at 10 years old cost me $4200. I had to replace wheels once (rubber, $600) and the transmission failed on me ($850) all within my first 8k kilometers.
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.
NC750 is 750cc. Very big super costly bikes are an American thing. Third world works perfectly fine with a 50CC - 150CC for under $1000, to a super premium bike 300CC if you want to show off.
You always have the option to spend more. America has this macho bike person stereotype to live upto where you must buy a bike close to 1000CC.
I live in Switzerland tho. But might be true, it's "big" because of mountains and because I actually use it to commute and travel on the autobahn which is no fun if you are slower than anyone else. Most people here have 500-800cc
You got scammed if by rubber you mean that 2 motorcycles tires cost $600.
Wheel cost alone was about $300 for both, rest is work time and new breaks.
Is it wheel or wheel+tire (you mention "rubber").
The tire alone is about $300, about $200 in work and $100 or so was a break replacement.
If you're not changing your own tires a lot of cycle shops charge a good bit for labor to mount tires.
Seems like most shops around me want $200+ in labor to do tires. That got me to just start doing it at home. Although it's a pain to do it right with spoons and not mar up the rims (or your fingers). I'm not bothering to invest in the space for a whole tire changing station in my garage. I definitely don't blame people for just eating the cost and doing it at a shop.
It's different with car tires because there's tons of places that do car tires. Far more competition with big national chains all over the place. Not always true with bikes. The labor costs they charge for dang near any little bit of work really drove me to do almost everything I can at home.
Every motorbike shop has the tooling amortized already. It takes less than 5 minutes to swap a tire and motorcycle tire tend to be cheaper than highend bicycle tires due to economy of scale.
The Honda NC750 isn't a superbike, there is no reason to spend that amount of money on 2 tires.
Ok, you go tell that to the two shops within a reasonable distance to me. Last time I tried telling them that they didn't budge.
I'm well aware they're charging a lot for it. They do it because that's what people around here pay for it. And given they've got a few days of work queued up before they even got around to fixing up the fork tubes I removed for them, it seems like they're not hurting for business charging what they charge.
I'm not poor but I think it's ridiculous to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a car. I learned that after buying a new car when I got my first job. Since then about $5k is my limit.
The median US commute distance is <10 miles [0], which is well within ebike or motorcycle range. You can get a new ebike on Amazon that will go up to 30mph for $500, or get a used motorcycle that will go highway speeds for ~$2500.
There are of course other trade-offs with these modes of transport, but they are usually just as fast (and sometimes faster) at single-digit-mile distances. My hope is that as we improve biking infrastructure, biking will become an increasingly-viable primary mode of transit.
[0] https://nhts.ornl.gov/assets/2022/pub/2022_NHTS_Summary_Trav...
Unfortunately the US is moving hard in the opposite direction, making cycling choices less achievable.
https://ctmirror.org/2026/03/12/bike-walking-trails-lose-fed...
I cycle everywhere in Shanghai and I would not even buy a bike if I lived in the US. Motorcycles are for wannabe organ donors. Maybe I’d change my mind if robocars took over from human driven ones but I’d be hesitant about commuting by bike in Ireland, never mind anywhere in the US. Good bike infrastructure is rare.
> Good bike infrastructure
Is also really cheap to build.
The construction is cheap, overcoming the obstruction is not.
My first car was $1k bought in Michigan in 2006. It was a massive POS and took $1,500 in repairs to run reliably. I immediately bought a $7k car when I got a job.
I still drive a '97 4runner that I bought for 5k around 2020. I've probably put 5k into repairs. I've spent less on it than anything I could buy new, and it will probably outlast us all. Nearing 300k miles on it now.
Very smart to go with a Toyota! I did the opposite and learned the hard way that the 'discount' for buying American will be paid for in $3k increments whenever it wants over the next few years until your finally give up and just buy the Toyota you should have bought to begin with.
Nowadays Toyotas are more expensive than fords and every Toyota hybrid has a year long waitlist. Everything is priced in today.
My current car is 54 years old. I bought it in 1986.
Is it sitting on blocks on your lawn or does it actually roll?
It's called maintenance. And probably a diesel engine.
Nah. It's got its original 340 V8, but bored, stroked, ported, forged crank & rods, gear drive, roller cam system. Dynoed at 400 hp.
I can't remember seeing another one (Dodge Challenger) on the road for decades.
My original plan was to swap in a 383 big block. I talked it over with a Mopar motorhead, and he said the big block unbalanced the car, and was difficult to work on because it didn't really fit in the car. He said the 340 would produce a lot of power reliably. I took his advice and didn't regret it. The car is terrifying when one steps hard on the gas.
That's awesome! And probably outranks anything I've seen (or heard).
It's an E-ticket ride, that's for sure! All old school.
I drive it a couple times a week. Sorry to disappoint you!!
My newest and most expensive car cost $5k in freedom dollars. It gets the job done. I have an older, more clapped out vehicle that cost $1500, and is in surprisingly decent knick for a 30 year old car, but it does need a paint job and some imminent TLC to keep it from deteriorating. That will cost more than it's worth, but I think it's worth doing in the long run.
> Car debt is terrible. But many people can’t get car debt, because many banks won’t write a $3,000 car loan, much less to someone with unsteady income. The bottom quintile often can’t even reach the $1,000 car - it’s hard to get out of the cycle where you can’t get a job because you don’t have a car. When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them.
Banger post. My first car was a $1200 Geo Prism that I bought through the mechanic shop at the gas station up the street. It was older than my (younger) brother; got a good 5 years out of it before the transmission literally fell apart on Rt 2.
My grandfather bought me a $200 Ford Taurus at a car auction. I hated that car. It was this ugly green color and handled like a boat. But I drove it for many years, mostly to part-time jobs waiting tables or working at a butcher shop when I was in college. It finally met its end one winter in Worcester, Mass when the road salt ate through the flange that held the exhaust pipe on. This happened while idling in the parking lot in front of a Jo-Ann Fabrics store. If you’ve never experienced an unmuffled V6, think twin engine turboprop loud. A kind employee at Jo-Ann came up with a clever solution to hold the exhaust pipe against the chassis using baling wire so that I could at least drive it without the exhaust pipe dragging on the ground. I continued to drive that car, until my neighbors complained that the “tank noise” was waking them up in the morning. I replaced that car with another car that was even worse, but that’s another story.
I am comfortably middle class now. I still buy budget cars because I can’t get past how outrageously expensive most cars are now. But even now I still think, every time I sit in my new (well, three year old) car: wow, this is awesome. I don’t know if my friends think those same thoughts, because I would be honestly a little embarrassed to explain why I feel that way.
I think that anyone who has not experienced the slow churn of driving a car with the engine light on for years, some duct tape holding something in it, is missing nothing. But I still feel like a child with a base modern family car. It is the hint of time travel we are allowed.
It's not fun or bragging-worthy or anything. The "haha the driver door doesn't open" bits are very different from getting stranded in random places. The only good experience is if you manage to fix it for cheap.
My dad put electrical tape over the check engine light in my car...
I'll bet ⅓ of Craigslist car listings had the codes cleared right before the test drive
I have one piece of junk and one newer (ie 2012) car, so I get to experience the difference every week. Except, the driver side window doesn't work in either car. Wish power windows weren't invented.
> I continued to drive that car, until my neighbors complained that the “tank noise” was waking them up in the morning.
Curious why not simply replace the exhaust flange? Cheap and easy repair.
It was cheap, but on this car, it was not easy. I tried. I would have no trouble replacing it now, but then, I had no money, no tools, and I could not afford to bring it to a mechanic.
This made me laugh nostalgically. A Geo Prism was one of my first "$1000 cars" as a kid. Fun little car, but once it hit 40 it started shaking like a tree. I always joked that if I drove it on the highway it would shake itself apart around me and I would end up with suspended in air with only a seat and a steering wheel left, looney tunes style, before plummeting to the ground.
I sold it off for a different $1000 car before it happened, but sounds like that's precisely what happened to you!
I'm curious about the insurance aspect of this, do people buying $1000 cars forego insurance?
At that tier you buy minimum coverage liability. That coverage is pretty cheap, but even so, many choose to risk it.
You get the absolute bare minimum required by your state, it basically just covers the other driver you hit. It's pretty awful since if you are badly injured beyond what their underinsured driver's coverage is for, you're likely not going to get a lot of money. You'll definitely get everything their policy states but the remainder comes out of your own uninsured motorist coverage and health insurance. People that buy bare minimum coverage typically don't have a lot of assets so there'll be nothing to recover from them directly.
I buy bare minimum coverage because it has been my experience that you end up screwed in the event of a collision no matter what kind of insurance you have. Insurance companies are in the business of taking your money now and finding every possible excuse not to give it back later; I'd rather keep it in my own pocket.
This is part of the reason I prefer inexpensive cars: buying only what I can afford to pay for outright means there is no loan which would obligate me to carry a comprehensive insurance policy.
Probably not even that.
Supposedly about 20% of drivers in El Paso are uninsured, so yes?
Texas needs to be stricter about this and start suspending licenses
Suspending licences doesn't stop people from driving anymore than not having insurance doesn't.
It’s a deterrence and enforcement mechanism. Because if you get pulled over, you might go to jail in some states.
And then we start throwing people in prison because they were too poor to legally go get groceries or go to work.
Car-dependent city design a travesty, grossly hurting the poor. You shouldn't need to pay insurance and operate an expensive machine just to live.
And yet at the same time I see uninsured driving as a really bad and extremely selfish crime. You're risking seriously messing up someone else's life to save some small amount of money every month.
Poverty may explain uninsured driving. It doesn’t justify making everyone else eat the risk.
I fully agree with that. It's an extremely selfish crime in many ways and I agree there should be harsh penalties for the crime. But at the same time it's also kind of a failure of society that we've designed most places to live in the US to need a car to survive.
It's not surprising people are willing to do the bad thing when you don't really give them many other good options. We should all be better at empowering people to not have to be in such a situation where the bad option seems like best choice for them in the moment.
If the options were drive and potentially end up in jail or just take the cheap/free reliable bus to get to work, which would they take? If the options are potentially end up in jail or lose your job, which choice do you pick?
This is framing it as a false binary. People need to take personal responsibility. They can walk, ride, bike, phone a friend, relative etc
So yes it is surprising and wrong
> They can walk, ride, bike, phone a friend, relative etc
Yeah they can walk in a city without sidewalks. They can bike in a city without any bike infrastructure. They can ride in a city without busses. Sure sounds effective and safe.
You're blind to reality if you think the average American city and town is actually designed to get by with people walking or biking or riding public transit.
Let's say you live here:
https://maps.app.goo.gl/c7Zd2Ce2aKJaq7xV6
You can't legally drive for whatever reason now. How do you get to your job in Plano? How do you go get groceries? It's a 40 minute bicycle ride each way to the closest grocer. There is no transit.
You are making excuses.
Yeah, even if they properly enforced this and made cheap car ownership more expensive, people always have their choices and can deal with it. If this makes car-dependent cities non-viable then ok. Probably wouldn't even do that, they'd either find the money or use motorbikes instead.
I'm not. I stated these crimes should be severely punished, and I'm all for cop.cars with ALPRs that match insurance info/expired registrations/etc to make enforcement higher. I'm probably for even more strict enforcement than you're comfortable with. This is a bad crime, and we should do more to make it not happen.
You have no answers for people in that position.
I do.
We shouldn't design our cities and towns like this.
If you find a machine you've been building tends to mangle the operators hands you don't just shrug your shoulders to the problem. You figure out the proper ways to add guards, build in lockouts, make it so people practically can't mess up their hands in normal operation as much as possible.
The problem with that analogy is people aren’t machines. They’re making choices.
Bad city design can make things harder, sure. It still doesn’t remove personal responsibility for choosing to drive illegally.
In the example the machine is the city design. It's the thing we can make better designs so people are less likely to put their hands (or someone else's) into the grinder part. You make it so it never even begins to make sense to drive illegally. Why risk prison time when it's a short bike ride or a reliable bus ride?
> It still doesn’t remove personal responsibility for choosing to drive illegally.
I never, ever, once even slightly suggested otherwise. I've been very consistent: it's a harsh and selfish crime that routinely ruins innocent lives which should have steep penalties and strong enforcement. I just don't like that we then don't actually address why people end up making that decision, we just act like it isn't really a problem at all, meanwhile more and more people drive illegally.
Quit burying your head in the sand to the actual solutions to this problem. You'll have far fewer people stealing food when they're no longer hungry.
lol, Copeville TX
I can find tons of other examples in every state and practically every metro area.
It's higher in Los Angeles. And I don't know if they have licenses. What I've heard is if they get in an accident and can't drive away, they run away on foot and report the car stolen.
And I guess they don't get pulled over because there aren't ALPRs or cops are ignoring the hits? I had my insurance lapse for 1 day and they still pulled me over a week later off a stale list, so idk.
I drove a $1000 car for a long time back in my poor days. You could get minimum liability insurance for $50/month or even less. Just whatever you needed to be able to drive legally. Thankfully I was never in any crashes but I always drove with the expectation that crashing would be financially ruinous and tried to be extra careful.
Usually, normal insurance is reasonable, or if it's not, you get liability only because the difference in cost is enough to buy another car after a few years.
Unfortunately there's a fair bit if industry built around charging people who are stretched financially more, but it's possible to avoid that.
Having more wealth if anything has had me buy less insurance. My newer car is liability only. Worst case if it blows up, I can afford a cheap replacement that I've already more than saved up for by not paying full coverage.
Also, that $4K cash for clunkers was a lot. I agree with the author, that would've totally gone into my pocket if they did it today. I still have my old car from college that's worth about $500 now, purchased for $1500, and I don't need it.
If you can afford to eat the loss, don’t insure it.
Obviously insurance companies make money on average for every policy. If they didn’t, they would go bankrupt. So on average, every time you buy insurance, you lose.
So insure only what’s required by law, or things that would throw your life off track if they vanished.
Yep. Which is also why I find vision insurance ridiculous. No it doesn't cover me going blind, it covers a pair of glasses at best, more like 25% of one.
Vision and dental "insurance" in the USA is a mechanism of paying someone with non taxable income, it is not insurance.
Dental yeah, vision is just a scam. There are also "life insurance" plans that are basically tax-advantage investment/inheritance funds if you have like $50M+.
This is the way to understand it. Also, sometimes discounts "in network", but that can be pretty mixed in usefulness.
Sure, you can use HSA/FSA money on these things, but better to go through "insurance" and keep/use that money for other things.
On the other hand, you likely need more liability insurance with more wealth, at least in the range where this topic of affordable transport comes up.
In an accident, your risk becomes not the cost to restore your ride, but the cost to defend yourself from vampire litigants looking to suck you dry.
Without significant assets, you can just treat bankruptcy as your answer here. With growing assets at middle-class and higher levels, that would be a pretty painful outcome for most.
I suppose, once you are fabulously wealthy, you can wisely be self-insured again, simply trusting that your wealth can defend itself in a sustainable way?
My insurance is getting to the point where I might do the same. My car is worth maybe a third of what it was new, and my monthly insurance bill is the same, it's nuts. I may go with a significantly higher deductible as a compromise.
Also be aware that even if you buy comprehensive insurance for an old car (don't do it), they won't actually cover anything useful.
If there is an accident, the insurance company will say: Your car is only worth $700 per blue book value and your deductible is $500 so here's $200 and your title is now totaled.
Buy liability only and self-insure for any damage (or just buy a new beater as needed).
I've eschewed collision insurance, and what I've saved on those premiums is far more than the cars were worth.
You can't legally forego insurance (at least in the USA). But comprehensive insurance is silly to pay for an old car so you buy only liability so it's a lot cheaper.
I just carry liability. There's no point in comprehensive coverage on such a car. My car insurance costs about $500/yr.
Jesus, only $500 a *year*?? May I ask where you live in? I live in MI and I pay about $990 a year for minimum liability insurance.
I live in the west. I also have an excellent driving record and drive a small econobox.
Here's an interesting story that gave me greater understanding of how insurance is priced. Years ago, I worked at a place where I lived 5 miles away as the crow flies. However, due to geography, the only way to get between my work and my home was by car, using one of the most dangerous freeways in my state.
I got tired of the commute and moved closer to work, close enough that I didn't have to use the freeway (or even drive unless I was lazy) anymore. I reported the change of my residence to my car insurance company, and they cut my premium by a third.
They didn't say why, but I'm certain the reason was that I didn't take that freeway 10 times per week anymore.
Damn that's a big difference!
They typically carry liability
I guess it can be like the Terry Pratchett boot theory a bit. But yeah even among your circle, you need to be careful. I know somebody who got a junk car for a bad price because it was from somebody in their circle and everyone else vouched for the seller.
Very few people buying a new car keep it long enough to make it cheaper than buying $5-10k cars.
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.
The question isn't so much how long it lasts until the engine explodes, it's how expensive is maintenance. That's the boot theory part. If you can't save up enough for the $10k car that lasts 15 years (though you mentioned a timing belt replacement and on some cars that's a few thousand $, ask me how I know...) and instead can only afford to keep buying $1000 cars, that could turn into a slew of smaller fixes that add up to a lot more than the car was initially bought for.
I'm also a bit surprised you'd buy a new car. Off-lease is much cheaper and they're still fairly new ish.
Toyota Echo - perhaps the car car ever made.
Actual title: "How Poor People Buy Cars"
if you can do a little maintenance you can go a long way... builds character too.
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"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." It's reliably a marker of bad comments and worse threads.
Also: "Don't be snarky."
(FWIW I don't think you meant to do either of these things, but the worst internet patterns propagate unintentionally.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How do you expect their material conditions to improve if nobody attempts to get more stuff to them?
I doubt the "HN crowd" was about to do anything, but it'd be better if someone saw some sort of market opportunity here. It sounds pretty miserable not being able to get to a well paid job. I personally appreciate all the people who lent me money and sold me cars. It enabled a lot of income for me, over a lifetime.
Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale.
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).
The solution to car problems is not more cars. It's serious alternatives to driving. We don't need Chinese cars. We need trains, busses, and bikes.
In the long term, yes, but infrastructure projects are famously drawn out in the US due to meddling from NIMBYs, companies puppeting sham environmental groups, and third parties forcing their way in and holding projects hostage unless they get a slice of the pie among other things.
It’s a battle worth fighting but public transport infrastructure isn’t going to happen overnight and people will need cars that won’t bankrupt them until then.
The advantage of busses and bikes are that they can use the same roads we already built for cars. We don't need to build new infrastructure to make busses and bikes much better, we just need to limit car access. That can be done by significantly lowering speed limits for private vehicles, tolling a lot more roads and streets, and in cases where we can (especially in cities) ban personal vehicles entirely.
Trains need infrastructure, but a lot of the train infrastructure is already there, it just needs to be repaired and modernized. The USA freight network is one of the most comprehensive train networks in the world. The problem is that is has gone through decades of neglect, and trains are required to crawl through a large portion of the network so as to not derail. Urgent modernization of the rail network could happen in years instead of decades.
The things you’re describing aren’t “alternatives to driving.” They perform a different function. Most Americans don’t aspire to live like Chinese people packed into high rises with 0.8 kids taking the train to work. They want to live where they want to live, then take their 2-3 kids to school and themselves to work 10-15 miles away without having to plan their lives around a public transit schedule.
I'm American, and I don't normally drive, because I use busses, bikes, and trains to get to my destinations. I sold my last (hopefully ever) car over a year ago.
I'm sorry to shatter the dreams of most Americans, but the world has finite resources. Buying a car when you're poor is hard, because cars are expensive, because they are extremely resource demanding. Even with all the subsidies drivers receive, they still usually struggle with the cost.
By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
> but the world has finite resources
we pay our government to point guns at other people, so that resources become their problem and not ours
> By the way, you don't have to look at public transit schedules when your public transit works. I recommend visiting countries outside the US that have functional infrastructure.
I go to Japan once or twice a year. Even in Japan, many people take regional rail or (gasp!) busses, and those don't run every 5 minutes.
A majority of American households (58.4%) are childless and ~80% of Americans live in urban areas per the US Census Bureau. I think you might be misreading the desires of most Americans, based on the data.
I agree Americans love their cars, but will they love them with oil prices above $100-$120/barrel persistently? To be determined.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav...
> Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.
https://www.socialexplorer.com/home/post/the-us-urban-popula...
> According to the 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, approximately 286 million Americans (roughly 94 percent of the population) live in metropolitan statistical areas. Just 17.7 million people, about 6 percent, live entirely outside any metro or micropolitan area.
> The popular image of America as a land of small towns and open plains is, statistically speaking, a minority experience. The story of 21st-century America is, above all, a story of cities.
The census definition of “urban area” means nothing. I technically live in an “urban area” according to the census definition, but there’s soybean farms five minutes down the road from me.
The same is true for the definition of “childless” people. It counts my parents, who don’t have children living at home, but have my kids coming over to their house multiple times per week. Only 15% of women never have children. Most people arrange their living circumstances with the goal of eventually having kids. And once the kids grow up and leave, most people want to stay in the same area.
>Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids
Your 57% lacks relevance to the current conversation because it is 57% of a small percentage of Americans.
42 to 43% of Americans are either under 18 or a parent of an under-18-yo. Plus of course some outside that group will soon become parents. And some are empty-nesters who prefer to keep on living in the neighborhood they lived in when they were raising their children.
US total fertility rate is at record lows, and continues to decline. Childfree/childless rates are up, and will continue to climb.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11537490/
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/09/nx-s1-5777587/teen-birth-rate...
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2025/09/older-mothers...
https://www.scrippsnews.com/us-news/number-of-americans-who-...
https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-demographic-dead-end-...
https://ifstudies.org/blog/theres-no-mystery-to-americas-fer...
https://ifstudies.org/insights?id=3886
https://ifstudies.org/blog/1-in-4-projecting-childlessness-a...
> Childfree/childless rates are up, and will continue to climb
Desired family size is still 2.7 kids, and has been stable at that number for over 50 years: https://news.gallup.com/poll/694640/americans-ideal-family-s...
A growing gap between how many kids people want and how many they have militates against copying the dense housing patterns of Asian countries that have the lowest birth rates in the world.
Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility. And realized fertility is trending lower globally, as shown by my numerous citations. I’m willing to bet on this if you want, as a demographic scholar.
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-have-already-pass...
https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool
Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352811 - August 2026
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe... - SUERF Policy Note, Issue No 197, October 2020
“Talk is cheap, show me the fertility rate.”
> Desired fertility is like desired Lambos, all that matters is realized fertility.
Sure, people are having less kids because we banned building housing and then filled the housing we have with government subsidized illegal immigrants. What’s your point?
People are having less kids because women didn’t want them before, they just have the power to not have them now. This is covered extensively in the citations I provided in the comment you replied to. Housing might be a component, but it is not the root cause. Children are a luxury good now, not an extra hand on the farm.
~40% of annual pregnancies in both the US and internationally are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute and the UN, respectively), so even with fertility rates down in teens and the 21-40 cohort, we still have a long way to go in preventing unwanted pregnancies and children (which translates into a further declining fertility rate curve forward looking, model accordingly).
Birthgap - https://youtube.com/watch?v=m2GeVG0XYTc (two hours, but substantiates every assertion I’ve made, provided as an additional supporting citation)
I assist thousands of folks a year seeking permanent birth control obtain it, mostly the childfree but occasionally someone who already has a kid or two, ama; this is the cheapest, easiest win as it relates to avoiding suffering around unwanted children, and the emotional, time, and monetary costs of unwanted children at scale is simply too high. The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate.
You’re overlooking the Gallup studies showing that the desired fertility rate has been stable at 2.7, well above the replacement rate.
> The historical total fertility rate was because women were not educated and empowered; forward looking fertility rate is the true neutral rate
It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
> It’s not possible for an outcome that would result one extinction of the species to be the “true neutral rate.” Rather, even if what you say is true (and I think it isn’t given people’s stated preference for 2-3 kids) what you’re seeing is a social contagion that will self correct when child-agnostic cultures die out in favor of cultures in which having children confers higher social status.
The only culture whose fertility rate isn't declining and converging around 0.5-1 is those in Israel, and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so due to political winds changing.
Good luck to those desiring "children confering high social status" as inflation continues to increase and the cost of everything increases long into the future due to climate change and structural demographics shrinking working age populations globally. Being poor sucks, everyone figures this out eventually, and the future will not be as nice as the recent past was. Kids have a cost, can those who want them for status afford them? We'll find out soon enough.
> The only culture whose fertility rate isn't declining and converging around 0.5-1
U.S. Muslims and Mormons both have a total fertility rate well above replacement (2.2-2.5). https://news.rakwa.com/2025/08/29/muslim-and-arab-fertility-...
Muslim Americans are among the most highly educated demographics in the U.S., and Mormons are around the average. So it’s definitely possible without turning the clock back before women had education and choices.
> and they're going to have to figure out how to support themselves economically as the US tilts away from doing so…
Hard to take you seriously as a “researcher” when you apply antisemitic tropes to math. Israel’s GDP is about $700 billion, and growing at 3% (that’s $20 billion) a year. US aid is about $3 billion a year.
It’s one thing to mime the meme for shits and giggles, but you’re now trying to use that in a rational argument.
https://vividmaps.com/public-transportation-in-the-united-st...
Never happens on the timescale of the next decade, maybe two. How far along is California high speed rail? When did they start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail (construction began in 2015 and it won’t be operational until at least 2031, 16 years later) If you break ground today, you won’t see new public infrastructure operational for at least a decade. Brightline light rail was built in Florida and is approaching insolvency, even with 3M riders per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline
We could provide subsidies to move the disadvantaged to major urban cores with public transportation systems, I’d support that. Have to find the funds to do it though. Cheaper than trying to build anything new in the US for sure.
https://dailyyonder.com/half-of-all-rural-counties-are-losin...
https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/civilization/geography/map-us...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/poverty-area-measures...
(Where will those bikes, busses, and trains you mention be built? China, as they are 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity)
I hear this a lot, but it’s not an excuse for never starting. Amsterdam started taking their non-car infrastructure seriously in the 1970s and now it’s seen as an example for the rest of the world.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
Asking to see a realistic roadmap and timeline is being a realist, not a defeatist. If Amsterdam started in the 1970s, that’s fifty years ago. Maybe we can make progress by the 2060s-2070s? Or we can just wait for China to manufacture all the EVs the world needs. Which is more likely to occur first?
Consider the US has $40T in debt and no will to raise taxes at this time, and therefore no will to spend on public infrastructure projects. Where will the capital come from?
How and when will we start? How many elections need to occur to appropriate funding? How much of the US electorate has to turn over for the right people to be elected to appropriate funding? Until shovels are in the ground, it’s vaporware and dreams.
It doesn’t have to be a massive nationwide project on par with the national highway project. It can start with local communities.
The mayor of Carmel, IN thought traffic circles were better than intersections and wanted more mixed use development. They have that now, nearly every intersection in the city has been replaced over time as they were due for routine work.
In Detroit they are in the process of building out a 29 mile greenway around the city.
These city level projects are a lot more important than the national ones, when it comes to reducing car traffic in cities and having an impact on people’s most frequent trips.
Seeing this at a local level could inspire more rail connections between cities, which could also come from the private sector. We have already seen a couple examples of this.
For anything funded by the federal government, you’re right. They have a huge mess on their hands, and need to get serious about cleaning it up. They have no business kicking of any major public works projects until that happens (though that has never stopped them in the past). But at a local level, things can still move forward and we are seeing it happen to some extent, though it often still feels more like a hobby than a firm conviction.
> Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale
No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban electronics in cars so you can actually hold onto them and repair them yourself.
The US lost that global argument when it decided financialization mattered more than manufacturing. A majority of Americans cannot afford their basic needs to be met on their income, it’s not “a bit more expensive,” and it’s for legacy auto profits, not to maintain domestic production capacity.
No one is banning electronics in cars, and US legacy auto will never catch up. They made their choice to prioritize profits over investment.
Assessing the Evolving Global Competitiveness of the US Auto Industry - https://itif.org/publications/2026/03/23/assessing-evolving-... - March 23rd, 2026
> While the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—accounted for 92 percent of domestic auto share in 1965, this share would fall by half, to 46 percent, by 2015, and to 38 percent by 2024.
> From 1995 to 2022, China’s share of global automotive vehicle output skyrocketed eightfold, from 3 to 25 percent, while the U.S. share slid from 23 to 14 percent.
> In 2007, cars sold in the United States contained 38 percent U.S.- or Canadian-made content on average; that portion declined to 18 percent by 2023.
(BYD sells more EVs internationally than Ford does in total, and they intend to be the largest global automaker in the next five years)
BYD Says It Will Be The World's Largest Automaker In 5 Years. - https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/byd-sa... - June 11th, 2026
China's BYD Overtakes Ford in Global Sales for the First Time - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinas-byd-overtakes-ford-glo... - February 12th, 2026
No sane poor person would buy a used Mercedes. Parts and repair would cost more than the car. The only people that would think a $1000 Mercedes is worth it would be rich.
Depends on the Mercedes. There was a time where Mercedes made cars that had a reputation for reliability similar to Toyota's today, and those cars are still fairly reasonable to keep running. The problem is that they're now becoming collectors items. Anything from the last 25 years though? Best to look elsewhere.
A W123 mercedes (late 1970s-early 1980s) is an exceptionally well built car. Reliable, easy to work on yourself if you're handy, parts not expensive. At this point they're getting hard to find and prices for decent ones are climbing but for a long time they were a great car and easy to find for low thousands.
You could say similar things about older BMWs. People leave notes on my 2004 Honda CR-V asking if I want to sell. A Honda civic I put on Craigslist took less than hour to sell. Repairability of any used car is becoming increasing problematic. Nursing an old automobile past its prime is becoming a lost art:)
I've owned two Hondas and I would not touch another one. Both had transmission failures at under 200K miles. They actually are designed so that you can't change the filter without removing the transmision from the vehicle and splitting the case. I will say that the engines seem good.
Its W123. Build like a tank, things that break are easy to repair by hand in the driveway.
I'm sure this post will start dozens of AI startups to help poor people with their car buying experience.
What about selling busses and trains, and buildings bike lanes and train tracks? Loans and cars aren't the solution to loans and cars, but there are solutions.
I lived in a place for a few years that had a free public transportation network. I can’t tell you how liberating that was, because it meant that I could get to lots of places without owning a vehicle. They even had bike racks on the busses, which meant that you could easily cover the last mile.
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.
> A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom.
More than half of the federal budget is for entitlements.
You’re missing the part of the budget that no longer exists because of tax reductions for the wealthy.
Also, so what? It should be more.
Taxes were not reduced for the wealthy.
Citation needed, or at least qualification.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/what-will-tax-provisions-...
https://www.npr.org/2025/11/05/nx-s1-5590112/trump-beautiful...
There were many new tax deductions, but they did not apply to the wealthy as they were phased out at higher income levels.
Plus, money isn’t always the reason people can’t or don’t drive. People may have disabilities that prevent them from driving. Heck, some people just don’t like driving. Improving public transit, biking, and pedestrian infrastructure solves most of these issues, and it’s frustrating how car-centric the US is in most places.
The OP addresses that:
"When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them."
Most people hate all drivers except themselves.
Too late – we're going to see "Show HN" posts of vibe coded apps related to this in 48 hours
Well that was random
Is this sarcasm? Serious question. At least half of HN is autistic. Anywhere there’s friction there’s a market opportunity. Everyone knows that. So this must be sarcasm.
[dead]
Wow! This didn't last long on the front page. Strange - I thought it was an honest and informative little article.
I noticed it on the front page. An hour later, it's on page 3.
<edit>
Now I'm just curious to see how fast the downward trajectory is on this currently 70-post article is. Still in the 1-2 hour range and now it is on page 4 of HN.
Yeah when you think of it, HN is like a 1 topic reddit without messages ability, so front page is a crapshoot
Buying a beat-up used car is risky. They are cheap for a reason, they have repairs that cost thousands. And cascading repairs, you don't know what else is wrong until the first problem is fixed, and the first problem itself is $3000 - $5000. The article has anecdotes that worked out for some people, but it doesn't work out for most people. It is like buying a lottery ticket.
Buying a new cheap car is the safest, and I'm sure there are always some models available under 20K.
Poor people (or even non-poor people) can buy the cheapest transportation available. US used to have the cheapest cars in the world. Its completely changed now, all you need to do is to ask your administrators to let the manufacturers from China bring them in.
1) They can buy a cheap car that will cost nothing in fuel. This is the worlds cheapest SOLAR CAR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk6aTKV-des
2) They can buy EV KEI cars (https://insideevs.com/news/807141/byd-racco-kei-driven-japan...)
3) They can ask for biking trials to be built. Atlanta seems to have built many miles of connected trials.
4) EV Golf carts are a perfectly acceptable form of transportation: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-golf-cart-kingdom/
Ask your admin to allow cheap cars/KEI/golf and work with your local city to build walk/bike/golf-cart trials. Its a one time cost, you can make transportation cheap permanently.
> I'm sure there are always some models available under 20K
Since you are sure, can you name a few?
You can't because none exist. There are no new cars in the USA for less than 20K.
The alternatives offered here are nonsensical. Where in the US does one buy this youtube solar car or KEI cars? Nowhere, that is where. They are not sold in the USA.
Golf carts are legal on hardly any roads so that is another non-starter unless you live in a neigborhood where they are allowed and never plan to go anywhere outside of it.
Cycling is great, that is the only practical suggestion on the list. But of course a bike is not a car so if someone actually needs a car, a bike is not a car.
For anyone poor who needs cheap transportation, old beater cars are the best.
Don't have to be poor either, for anyone who doesn't want to throw good money away at depreciation, old cars are the best deal. As an engineer in Silicon Valley I could technically afford many kinds of expensive cars but I've yet to ever spend more than 20K on any car or truck. Buy used, keep forever, that's the best.
> Since you are sure, can you name a few?
https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/spt-new-cars-under-20k
This link does now show a single new 2026 model car under 20K, what is the point?
That link shows results in your area.
In my area it does show 1 2025 Nissan Versa allegedly for sale at about $19k.
If that is being sold as new, it is a leftover model that has been sitting in the dealer lot for a year or so, depreciated accordingly.
A quick search shows me a bunch of 2025 Nissan Versas for sale between 16K-17K, so someone buying this dealer leftover for 19K gets an instant depreciation of ~2.5K.
It's also ~$19k more than anyone should spend on a Nissan Versa.
> Buying a new cheap car is the safest
There is no such thing as a new cheap car.
Not in the US, anyway. Outside the US, there are loads of them. You can buy a brand new car for about $3,500 in India: https://www.marutisuzuki.com/arena/s-presso
What's interesting is other items, like food or housing, are also much cheaper in India.
There are a few reasons for that.
First, the cost of labor is very low.
Second, with the exception of food, you get what you pay for. The housing is of poor quality compared to what you get in the west—it’d never pass inspection there. Everything is made with cheap materials. The cars are just decent enough but also aren’t salable in the west—they wouldn’t meet crash safety standards (no airbags, insufficient bumpers, etc.). Think 1970s-80s econobox.
Third, the government is more than willing to allow increased housing density. Towers are popping up everywhere. But the transportation infrastructure is still terrible, traffic is congested, and commutes are long. It can take over an hour to move 10km there.
> The housing is of poor quality compared to what you get in the west—it’d never pass inspection there. Everything is made with cheap materials.
All the houses are built with concrete. They are pretty much indestructible. You could say India has the worst products/services in the world, but housing might not be one of them.
> The cars are just decent enough but also aren’t salable in the west—they wouldn’t meet crash safety standards (no airbags, insufficient bumpers, etc.). Think 1970s-80s econobox.
Mahindra is selling cars in Australia: https://www.mahindra.com.au/
> Third, the government is more than willing to allow increased housing density. Towers are popping up everywhere. But the transportation infrastructure is still terrible, traffic is congested, and commutes are long. It can take over an hour to move 10km there.
Spot on!
Mahindra is selling cars in Australia but they’re not the same models sold in India. Same names but different specs.
Fair enough that the housing is made from concrete but the quality is still pretty poor. The foundations are uneven, as are the floors. The doors, windows, flooring, plumbing fixtures, etc. are, for the most part, cheap junk. The same is happening all around the world as builders race to the bottom, but India was pretty far down there. They’re in good company though; the same is true of all poorer nations.
I'd dispute buying a new car is cheapest, having bought a number of cheap and one new car. The cheapest is probably a basic reliable model, about 15 years old. Toyota corolla type stuff. If something does pack up you can usually fix them quite cheap. My ~$700 corolla hardly cost anything to run and lasted about six years before needing scrapping.
New cars are nice - shiny and reliable but you pay a bit. It can also be risky from the financial point of view if you buy on credit.
A tip for buying cheap ones is buy off someone wealthy who doesn't care about the money from the old car and would otherwise get like $0 from a dealer.
Poor people can't afford a new $13K car. EVs also make less sense if you live in an apartment.
Agreed, and thats why we have the boots theory.
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...
I don't even think the cheap used cars are a more expensive way to live on average. If you get unlucky or scammed, sure.
Nobody is selling you a used Lexus or Toyota or Honda for cheap. It is usually a nondescript brand and model, like a geo metro or a model with known reliability issues.
Everything known can be sorted out.
Buying a Lexus would be a very stupid idea. You don't buy a luxury/premium model for cheap. Way too much gimmicky stuff/gadgets that can break and parts price are way too high.
When you buy sub $2000 car, you look for models that were already in the relatively affordable range and have been best sellers of their category: good knowledge from mechanics, good and affordable spare parts availability.
Lexus and Acura are the only luxury brands that are actually reliable, though they're not exactly luxury.
A Lexus is just a Toyota with nicer materials on the inside. They use Toyota parts that cost Toyota prices, they aren’t out to gouge you on parts like European manufacturers. Sometimes Lexus vehicles are cheaper than a similar Toyota, a Lexus GX460 costs less than a similar vintage Toyota 4Runner or Toyota Landcruiser.
And nobody is selling a new Toyota for a non-expensive price. The cheapest new cars are brands without reputations.