Americans can’t afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried
If only we had invented and built some sort of alternative mode of collective transportation. Maybe it could be in tunnels and ride on metallic rails. It would serve many people and make periodic stops to the same locations instead of the highway clusterf- we have today. Sad that we don't, but a man can dream though. A man can dream.
Reported as not really being politics, and I could see it as being more !news@lemmy.world or even !business@lemmy.world
But pocket book issues like this impact politics.
"It's the economy, stupid!" and all that.
Everything is politics.
The only way you can escape politics is to live alone on an uninhabited planet.
Even then, I'm sure someone would figure out a way to have conflicting ideas that need to be argued out. There's a reason Tom Hanks invented Wilson (and the real-life stories such concepts are based on), we NEED other people to engage with, to debate with, to argue with, for validation and support and to negotiate with in order for our ideas to sharpen and for our minds to stay stable. Without this, we lose our minds or even die.
So not only is everything politics, we can't live without it.
I think about this every time I see someone whinging about politics in entertainment.
Politics underpins finance at every level
I feel most of the mod decisions are arbitrary, but there's also a good reason we don't all just post everything in an "everything" com.
Have they Tried RAISING Prices while DROPPING Wages? That might help!
Why not just finance the unaffordable cars for 10-15 years? That'll solve the problem.
And ensure they catastrophically fail around year 6 or 7
The slow wither approach.
WHAT??? HOW WOULD THAT POSSIBLY HE----oh. I see what you did there. I ate the lemon.
maybe if dealers would actually tell you the price of the car instead of spinniing it as a monthly expense
Yes, but how can that poor salesman possibly get you into the most expensive car for the longest terms that way? They've got a commission to max out!
There is a dealership local to me that pays their sales staff annual salaries with benefits rather than working on commission. It’s the only place anybody in my family will buy a car now.
America had a public rail system already...
We nationalized rail during WW1, and then after giving it back they all went broke in the 60s
So then Amtrak was created (there's a push to privatize it right now) and when that was going to put private rail out of business, Jimmy Carter de-regulated rail so private companies could cut corners and not be replaced nationwide by Amtrak
We'll never get nationalized rail on a good scale with neoliberals, they'll never fix any problem where money is involved, because they'll take the offered money to change their minds.
Uh oh
In August, the share of subprime auto loans where borrowers had missed payments for 60 days or more was 6.43pc, according to Fitch Ratings. Bar a 6.45pc reading in January, this was the highest level recorded since Fitch’s data began in 1993 (back then, the rate was just 0.12pc) and far above the financial crisis peak of 5.04pc.
Woah
I'll tell you what though, I'm glad I have a paid off car.
About to buy one, but old and easy to fix. And cash lol.
How do I Michael Bury the auto loans? 👀
Are the millennials killing car ownership!?
Boomers told me millennials kill everything. Which by its own nature means millennials killed killing everything.
But that means they also killed killing killing everything
Not long ago I could buy a used van for 5000. Now I had to pay like 13k for a used one after our typical accident caused by another person had an insurance that wouldn't pay up.
That's such a shit business going around telling people they're covered but then in the end not actually covering anything. I get it cars depreciate.... Well great, why doesn't my insurance premium deprecate? I would gladly maintain the same level of payment if it means my car will be replaced. Similarly, if they won't actually replace my car, they should just tell me..you're going to need $5000 to make up the difference if you get into accident.
Buying a new vehicle hasn't made sense for about 30 years now.
I've been driving for about 30 years and in all that time, I've never owned a new vehicle. I kept buying used vehicles for about $2,000 - $3,000 per vehicle. The oldest one I've ever had is a 2004 Volvo station wagon and I still maintain it and it's still running as one of my main vehicles. My other main vehicle is a 2010 GMC Truck which I also maintain. They don't look new, they show a bit of rust around the edges, but they are still very good vehicles that will last several more years.
Once they break down enough ... I'll buy another used vehicle. In all, over the past 30 years, I've spent about $30,000 on multiple vehicles (I think I've gone through 8 or 9 in that time).
It has never made sense to me to buy a brand new $40,000 car that will only be used for about five years before you buy the next one.
That's going to become more and more difficult to do over time.
Cars are being designed to be difficult to repair and to fall apart in less and less time.
I agree ... I think the cutoff is about 2010-2015 vintage vehicles. I like Volvo cars and station wagons, they are literal workhorses that were designed by a Swedish company for winter use. And in that vintage, it is just at the peak when the company was still producing good vehicles and just before the point where they were heavily Americanized, then taken over by Chinese interests. The vehicles are still produced in Europe (I think) but of a lesser quality because the company got taken over by foreign interests. And like all manufacturers, they are moving away from the piston engine technology and transitioning to all electric.
Yes it is inevitable that everything will move away from old piston engines ... but I think it will all last another 20-30 years before it all becomes impossible or way too expensive for anyone to maintain their old clunkers after that.
I'd really like to know where you are buying 15 year old GMC trucks for $2000-$3000 that presumably run and aren't beat to shit.
I bought it when it was ten years old and from a friend of a friend who was selling it privately. The only real way to grab a good vehicle is if you know of someone who had a vehicle from new. It's just constant searching and luck that one is able to find vehicles like this. The guy I bought it from had it from new and took care of it and by the time I got it, it had minimal rust. He knew the truck's life was limited which is why he wanted to get rid of it. As soon as I took hold of it, the rust started growing on the damned thing and I've been fighting to keep it going and away from any further rust as possible. The engine and transmission are good and will last a very long time, its just the rest of the truck, especially everything from the wheel wells down (minus the engine and transmission) that will fall apart first.
Speak for yourself.
I have purchased multiple new cars over the last 25 years, and, while they’re more expensive than a used car (although that difference is shinking all the time), I also run them for years because I can keep up with maintenance. My last new car was bought 14 years ago and is pretty much still new condition. I still even have the plastic film over the climate control screen.
I don’t care about depreciation or resale values.
EDIT: Punctuation.
I can say this proudly because I live in northern Ontario which basically salts our vehicles for about six months of the year. We might as well live on an ocean coast, we have so much salt on our highways. I do my own undercoating every year (it's a real pain) and I put it on thick and in every nook and cranny. The work that I do just delays the rust, it doesn't prevent it because there is just too much salt up here. Mix into that ice and snow and all that stuff just cakes on, falls off, takes away the coating, exposed metal, more salt and repeat all winter long. I'm lucky if I can hold onto a vehicle longer than ten years up here.
I've never seen people more mad that a stranger paid a few thousand extra amortized over 14 years.
I have purchased multiple new cars over the last 25 years,
You're an actual dumbass. New cars lose 20% of their value the moment you drive it off the lot.
I don’t care about depreciation or resale values.
Clearly. You'd rather get ripped off by the dealership.
How about you get some life experience and try buying and maintaining a used car? Then you can see for yourself how stupid your assumptions are.
You're a smart person and can probably manage your money better than most Americans swept up in consumerist hysteria.
The problem is, most people bitching about "not having enough money" will say that the decisions you made are "not good enough" for them. They believe they are entitled to more before others who have less so they can give that excess to the people ripping them off.
And if you say anything about it, you're the bad guy.
Yeah, a lot of those shiny trucks and SUVs are bought on credit by people who really can't afford them and don't need a vehicle like that anyway.
Yeah, my current car is an almost 20 year old Mercedes c class, bought it a couple of years ago for 3k. Some of those cars that used to be at the upper end of the price range are pretty affordable when they get older. Mine had a good dealership service history, it's given me very little trouble, and it's great to have a nice car. I can't imagine wanting to buy anything new, even if I could afford to.
My 2003 E-Class remains the best car I've ever owned, except for one annoying fault that kept coming back with reman parts and new part availability was shit - the steering rack. I do fully believe I just had bad luck with the reman units personally, but it made me sell the car. It had almost 400k km on it at the time and still drove beautifully. Of course I replaced some ball joints and two lower control arms and a few other things... But that's natural.
Once living in your car became a viable housing alternative, they had to take that away, too.
Wait until they figure out we need food to live.
They already have. Why do you think grocery prices have been a major political talking point? Since most people don't have enough money to buy property where they can grow/raise their own food, and many municipalities explicitly ban the raising of animals to "protect" the agriculture industry, most people are stuck. Your only option is the monopolistic grocery chains.
Do you know what Henry Ford himself did?
Increased the wages so his own workers would buy his cars...
Henry Ford was a capitalist, racist, eugenicist asshole, but he had one thing the current capitalist, racist, eugencist assholes in power today don't: long term economic planning.
It's literally just supply side economics. If you have the power to increase the buying power of your customers, your customers can and will spend more money. Also more free time means people will want to spend more money on things to do and things to own, meanwhile if they're stuck spending 60-80 hours a week purely focused on work they'll be too tired to want anything other than food in their belly and a bed to sleep in
Not sure we should celebrate that man, but the idea
Fake News. All my homies can’t wait to go sixty goddamn thousand dollars in debt to by a house-sized . . I wanna say . . truck?
Me though, been pulling extra shifts - got my eye on that $90,000 volvo EV. Mmmm! You basically can’t afford NOT to buy it!
If I had the money lying around I'd totally buy a midlife crisis car. A v8, automatic coupe style with a real healthy rumble to it. I drive less than 3k miles/year, and barely travel far enough to make the lowest end of the fuel efficiency range. You know the kind of car that says "yeah this car is for fun, and that dude is probably not alright".
But I have class so at minimum I'm looking at burning $60k on like a used Lexus RC F.
Like come the fuck on you know? Even if I ponied up "half" that cost, the 5 year loan runs $700/mo. $700. Who the absolute fuck has a monthly extra $700 just sitting there right now AND that mystery $30k I mentioned.
Are people just not able to math?
No, they are not. That’s why a significant number of students fail math classes. The number of children who cannot even perform basic 7th-grade math is shockingly high. Then, they discover that they will pass even if they fail, so they relax and blame the teachers when their parents see their grades.
The average American car payment right now is like $670 per month. Its truly absurd. Its no surprise that people are drowning when you look at what theyre paying to have this or that.
Even more shocking is the amount of people buying their next car while still underwater on the first one. A large number of people are rolling $10k of prior vehicle debt into the purchase of a vehicle, driving up their monthly even further
Don’t forget about insurance and property tax. The monthly payment isn’t all you have to spend.
Registration fees too.
My wife and I are saving for a "down payment" for our next vehicle. I've got about $10k saved but I really need at least $20k down to make the payment manageable. I should be buying outright with $20, but here we are.
Trump is bankrupting Americans and America so they can install a technocratic dictatorship
Why do we only blame trump?
There's bi-partisan support for making sure China can't sell its EVs in the US, even though they cost $15k and have 300km range.
Meanwhile we have dumbasses buying teslas saying "they didn't get ripped off."
Of course part of the reason those Chinese EVs only cost 15k is because China heavily subsidized their EV market. Basically they did what the Americans and Europeans didn't have the guts to do and poured boatloads of government money into a brand new sector to give their companies a leg up while they ramped up. Guess what's going to happen next?
These companies have all of the knowledge that making multiple generations of EVs brings you, they have all of the tooling already, they can now start expanding into more markets and start making it really difficult for competition to compete because the competition put in only the effort that they had the financial incentive to put into EVs and therefore they're not ready to compete at all. The rest of the world basically ceded this entire industry to China because politicians were too heavily bought and paid for by the oil companies to do more than a pittance, and now the auto market is about to be heavily shaken up
Sure. An eroded economy. Stagnant wages for many long with decreasing buying power. Price hikes thanks to tariffs, increasing insurance costs, rising subscription costs, etc. Cars bought at inflated prices and high interest for extended payment schedules during the covid price gouging, and just generally way too expensive these days anyway, are all draining bank accounts far more quickly than ever.
Bet any repos don’t go back on lots for resale, they’ll park them in the desert somewhere just to prop up scarcity and new car prices.
Can't we have affordable repairable cars AND reliable public transport? That would sure be nice.
Many places in America at least are just too spread out. But we dont need a super mega duper feed f teenthousand to drive around. Shit like the Slate would be amazing if it could exist (I realize bezos funded it. Still doesn't keep it from being a bad idea).
Thats why I will argue old cars were undeniably better. You could actually repair them and they weren't rolling spyware with a subscription.
1990 to about 2014 is the perfect spot for cars. Before that is archaic for most people (i prefer 80s cars myself) and newer than that its just a corpo bot on wheels.
Might I suggest Open Source Repairable Electric Cars, Trains, Trams, Bikes, Bike-Cars, Walking Bikes, Boats, and VTOL's those would be awesome to get open source alternatives for
Slate EV is open. But watch, no one will buy them.
The name of my local mall is prefaced by "Cadillac Fairview (CF)". Cars have been overpriced for a long time now and the auto industry is investing in real estate. I think they may price themselves out of customers, just like the theater chains but at least they'll get a bailout.
Damn I wish theaters had priced themselves out yet people are still out here paying like $20+pp for a movie ticket. It wasn't even ten years ago I could go to a second run cinema and get tickets for $2 :(
This got 15 up votes?
US admin is catering to corporations who only want to suck in everyone's money.
The new corporate objective is to have everyone die penniless, with no inheritance for their children.
Except for the wealthy, of course. They know how to handle money responsibly, by investing it properly, and not blowing every last penny on fleeting pleasures like food, housing, and transportation.
When someone says family comes first, they often mean their family over yours.
Awww. Theyre still not gonna make them one cent less expensive
You mean there is a flaw in the capitalistic idea of infinite profit growth. I am shocked.
Don't forget proper bike infrastructure, trams, subway, busses. Like in most European countries. You'll end up with smaller roads, lower speeds, less accidents, cleaner air, faster transportation, less car parks so more room for development of huises, more jobs, less waste. Or you could widen the roads, remove sidewalks and force people to drive cars on a road crowded with massive trucks which will crush you like a tank when hit. Hard choice.
Sure but one of the problems is North American cities are to sprawled out.
Our cities are fine, they're just governed by shitheads. It's the spaces in between that are the hurdle.
That's one of the amazing things about ebikes is they make the sprawl so much more manageable!
Sure commuting 10 miles by ebike (probably about an hour commute or noticably less if you go faster than the 10mph average of an accoustic bike) isn't as nice as commuting 2-3 miles by ebike (about 15 minutes commute time at 10mph), but chances are you're already commuting between 30-60 minutes by car depending on traffic so what's making that a consistent 45-60 minute commute with no meaningful traffic jams and wonderful fresh air and sunlight?
So? Let's compare just one American city to the Netherlands, the entire country. Because an American city isn't bigger then our entire country.
I live in the centre, in Utrecht. I can take a train to Groningen or Maastricht, the 2 cities furthest away from where I live. I can bring my ebike on the train or take a public transit bike (so rental) at the station I arrive. Or I take the bus for the final part. Or when I go to Amsterdam, I take the subway and/or tram. Or when I go to a rural area, I take the strain, then bus or bike. Within 2 hours I can reach any city in my country with public transportation or 3.5 hours for any rural location. I can reach any part of Berlin in 7 hours. This is on the other side of Germany.
It's the layers of public transportation which solves issues of being sprawled out or super dense. Sprawled out? Faster transportation, like trains, bus and subway. Super dense? Tram, bus, bike.
I understand many Americans don't see it as a solution, as they have busses, trains and subways. But these networks are poorly planned. New York for example, all metro lines run to the centre making travel between suburbs a living hell. They have taxis, awesome, but they clutter the already cluttered streets even more. It's so dumb.
See these videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zysL_lkdtys on the design of Tokyo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP-G-inkkDg on the design of The Netherlands
You might say "but it's impossible to change our cities to public transit heavy, walking and cycling friendly cities, we're too far down the drain!". No. You're not. We designed Rotterdam, one of our largest cities, as an American city completely focused on cars (after it was wiped from the earth during the Second World War bombing by the nazis). It was shit. They changed the entire city to car unfriendly with the focus on walking and cycling, with public transit to support that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22ovt1EMULY
Anyone got a non paywall link.
Archive.is is your friend
Disable Javascript for that website and their paywall will disappear
Or use reader mode in your browser.
Install their Firefox extension (works on mobile too), never have this problem again.
How much do you use the train? I spent 8 years without a car, and let me tell you this, getting that 4 to 5 hours back that I was wasting on the bus, commuting, shopping, going to entertainment, Eric, that's something I don't ever want to do again. Bus and train combo with a bike still was hours to do a commute that takes maybe 30 minutes by car.
That's not really an inherent problem to buses or trains, but rather a problem with poor implementations of them. Build out mass transit and fund it properly, and they largely go away. At rush hour, I have 3 different train options that would get me from my neighborhood to the city center faster than I could by car, and cheaper on top of it.
If we keep on saying, "Well, it's not good enough now, so forget about it," we'll just be having this conversation again in a few years, lamenting the fact that we didn't take the chance to build out now, but probably with more people having even more cars.
Well, Shaun, lemme tell ya; I didn't mind the 4 to 5 hours a week I spent on the train or the bus. Partly, because sometimes I got to meet genuinely lovely and hilarious strangers, and even make friends with people I never would have met otherwise. Or help people that needed help, being in the right place at the right time. I kinda miss that, having chances at being a kind stranger.
And you know, there is the savings to consider. Not having to spend the extra 30 hours at a job I hate to pay for an $800 expense I don't need was worth the extra commute time, in my opinion. All that extra free time that I wasn't driving or working to afford driving, I could use to read books. Or write books.
Beyond that, it was nice to have the cheapest and most freeing exercise I'd get. That's more money I didn't spend on a gym membership, owning a bicycle and taking it to visit my friends or getting groceries. And when the weather got bad and I needed a car, I'd just call a taxi. Or set up a carpool with a coworker, offer to pay for gas. It was still cheaper than owning a car. It was nice to have a chance to make friends with my coworkers too.
How much effort did it take to plan my entire life around the logistics of taking my bike/the bus/the train? About as much effort as it did planning my life around owning a car.
The only time I ever needed a car, Shaun, was when I lived in the middle of nowhere and there was no public transit. Because the local government designed the infrastructure that way.
Well I don't know where you getting the name Shaun. But when I say 4 to 5 hours I don't mean 4 to 5 hours a week I mean 4 to 5 hours a day. I would get up and on the bus by 3:30 in the morning to be to work by 6:15 I would then get off work and I wouldn't be home until sometimes 5:00 or 6:00 at night and if there were a delay could be as late as 7:00 at night. I too had great experiences with people I met on the bus I'm at a lot of great people I took homeless people out to eat I became friends with quite a few people the bus drivers hell my next door neighbor that ended up moving in I knew him because he was a bus driver before he moved in. However there is a limit to how much we need to be able to do.
This is my absolute most favorite post comment and can relate to all that fully
My truck is 25 years old 139k miles and runs great. It will probably last another 80-100k and we just paid off my wife's car. We have no intention of taking on debt for a new vehicle unless it's necessary.
I'm round 250k miles on my car (admittedly, not American so it's actually a bit over 400k km) and it's not even the most kilometers I've had on a car.
Buy something with an engine and transmission that are known to last that doesn't have known rust issues, take care of it, and it will take care of you. You of course seem to have realized it already.
People literally rather sink themselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars every few years than try to learn how to take care of their own vehicle internals or invest in the tools required to do so, despite being more accessible than ever. Seriously, you can diagnose your car with your phone with the right adapter. That would have seemed like magic when I was growing up.
Just got my timing belt done, hoping to get to do it again at 200k miles
Yeah, why can't these people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like you?
That's the funny thing about it all: the ruling class couldn't give less of a shit about the wellbeing of the people. But they care about their companies' revenue, and that is threatened if people have no money to spend. That is why we need Universal Basic Income in the near future.
UBI is a great idea, but it allows people to take risks. Including the risk of forming a union, protesting in a larger way and so forth. That sort of happened with the Hippies in the US. It was easy to get a job, so people used that to earn some money, quit and enjoy themself for a longer period.
That is why the social safety net is as crappy as it is. Fear is the only way to keep the general population in line.
I shopped around for like 3 months before I finally found a car in my budget, and it was 600 miles away
My car needed more repairs than it was worth so I sold it and banked the cash.
I know what I want for my next car but it technically doesn't exist yet. They're still building the factory for it. 😟
Lord Bezos appreciates your sacrifice
I wouldn't buy that just based off their fucking terrible website design
that shit's basically unusable, can't even scroll through it on mobile
also wow another crossover, what's so special about this one? I'm only asking because the website wouldn't fucking tell me without flashing all sorts of shit at me
*oh wait that's actually an SUV, body on frame
What if Wall Street failed and collapsed? I feel like that would be good
Every time they face consequences for their actions, we are robbed to save them, so be careful what you wish for
Maybe we should stop passively watching them commit crimes. French style revolution is the only solution.
For every 1% increase in unemployment, 40,000 people die.
The status quo of poverty caused by wealth inequality results in around 183,000 deaths every year.
https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2023/04/17/poverty-4th-greatest-cause-us-deaths
Makes sense. https://www.lisep.org/tru
So happy mine are paid off.
t.b.f the reporting is more about whether these companies have hidden loans (including possibly loans that other lenders don't know about), which could have happened within railway companies just as easily as in car companies!
can we make city streets public transportation only and resort personal vehicles to the outer parts? Like we dont got trolleys going down our cities' broad streets/broadways these days, but lets get a shitton of busses goin up and down with no worry of joe in his civic.
This is not a singular issue. That’s still millions who prefer the US to be car centric, and they fight to keep it that way. Just move to Europe
Cars and Wall Street and the American people for that matter can all go fuck themselves. Can't we just have free and accessible public transit and walkable cities for fuck sake?
But the stock holders . . ..
/s
Public transport in the U.S is tricky. Half of the population probably is rural, and the U.S is very spread out which greatly increases the costs. American cities were also just built around cars. The car was like the most American invention ever for a long time outside of the firearm which made everyone equal in a way. Cars were sort of the thing Americans liked because it represented autonomy and freedom to people who were mostly stuck living with other people, and Americans traditionally being the most liberal, but also innovative culture, tended to butt heads a lot and needed personal space.
European cities were built in a time when people walked mostly, and are laid out to be compact and narrow. The entire EU is like the size of the U.S maybe even less. The population is much more urban. They have urban zoning, so you have houses mixed in with shops and industry where in the U.S you have HOAs, suburbs, parking lots, and dozen of miles of flat and sparsely populated cities with distances of hundreds of miles between large urban areas. Americans are also obsessed with material things and want to work long hours so traveling for work is harder.
Trump being dumb, wants to force Americans to buy shitty American cars. There is a reason nobody buys them, they are junk. They break, are a ripoff, they drink gas, even the small cars. They are slow and dangerous, and likely won't even last until they are paid off.
Without cars, many people have become desolate. Entire families have been made barren. It's kind of too late to fix it.
Its never too late to build better trains and bike lanes everywhere
It actually is because building a railroad these days is so incredibly expensive. Building bike lanes is also extremely expensive. The economy hasn't grown in 50 years in fact much of it has been shifted into bubbles to hide automation and globalization which hurts more developed economies. It's nice to have bike lanes be included when upgrading but it depends on the situation. In many places you can't really build wider roads without tearing down billions of dollars worth of buildings, and if you reduce the amount of road width, you greatly increase the amount of traffic which causes issues in cities. If traffic backs up through intersections, it brings entire chunks of a city to a halt and the problem just snowballs. Trains are cool but if you have to walk 20 miles after you get off the train station it's not really feasible for most people lt takes half a day at least to walk 20 miles and it leaves your body sore. A train station in a modern city might only cover a few thousand people but cost tens or hundreds of millions to build as you have to lay out track.
One potential solution is to tear down and rebuild entire areas of cities after they become desolate but with a more urban and public transport focused layout. This is still expensive but cities can actually start with a good layout, like wide roads, bike lanes, and sidewalks, with tunnels and walking paths and stuff everywhere with better urban zoning more like what they have in aisa and Europe, and then let the city build around that. Another solution is to just build cities from the start to be urban and let the populations migrate over time out of the old car centric cities so they can rebuild, but this is hard because of corporate capitalism which creates a very inefficient economy, so you just don't really have the resources to do these things like people did 100 years ago who lived in much more socialist and worker centric societies with more labor valued economies and less fiat currency protecting every terrible corporation from having to give up their assets to be better managed in an actual free market and small business.
Bicycles and trains. Always has been.
Those are nice, but they are not options for much of the US.
Yern idiot too