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So the tl;dr of this article is that lower prices are good for consumers, but manufacturers cannot sustain selling below cost (what a surprise). I wonder what

So the tl;dr of this article is that lower prices are good for consumers, but manufacturers cannot sustain selling below cost (what a surprise). I wonder what is driving demand lower. Has supply simply finally caught up to pent-up demand from the crisis? Is some other expenditure (housing, healthcare) sucking up discretionary spending that would otherwise go towards new cars? Is this a leading indicator of a drop in consumer confidence/spending that more traditional indicators haven't picked up on yet? Are people driving fewer miles (I don't know the exact numbers off-hand, but I believe the data doesn't support this)? Are longer-lasting cars hurting new car sales?

hueving 9y ago
It seems the last sentence rings true for me an my social circle. I have a 15 year old car that costs me almost nothing because it's paid for and worth so little that I only carry liability insurance. Sure, I could get an awesome new car, but there is absolutely no rational economic reason to do so. Other than missing lane assist and adaptive cruise, I see no useful features that have emerged in cars for nearly 20 years. Electric cars are about it, but the environmental impact of effectively throwing away a perfectly good car to get a new electric car defeats the purpose.
- Arizhel 9y ago
  >Other than missing lane assist and adaptive cruise, I see no useful features that have emerged in cars for nearly 20 years. You're forgetting fuel economy and crashworthiness. Fuel economy has improved greatly in the last 20 years; I drive a car that 20 years ago with this much power and weight would probably have gotten less than 30mpg on the highway, this one gets 40. Of course, gas prices are low so you might not care about this. But crash protection has also gotten far better in the last 15-20 years. You can walk away from a crash in a modern car that would have maimed or killed you in your 15yo one (even for a car of the same rough size). >Electric cars are about it, but the environmental impact of effectively throwing away a perfectly good car to get a new electric car defeats the purpose. Wrong. You're not "throwing away a perfectly good car", you're reselling that car on the used market to someone else, and in the end (assuming the market doesn't expand) this results eventually in some really old POS car somewhere being junked, which is good because it's pouring out emissions and wasting fuel. More people buying new cars increases the supply of newer cars on the used market, which helps push the oldest and crappiest cars out of usage. Of course, there's limits to this, but the point is: don't feel bad about getting rid of a "perfectly good car"; it's going to continue getting used, just not by you, and theoretically results in another car that really isn't "perfectly good" getting finally retired. The thing that really sucks here is that, in some states at least, you're highly penalized for buying a new or newer car because of personal property taxes. They should just eliminate these taxes for all but luxury vehicles maybe, to encourage people to buy newer cars to improve safety and emissions. There's already a disincentive in higher insurance rates; we don't need to add to that with pointless taxes.
  - jwong_ 9y ago
    There was fuel economic cars 15-20 years ago, if you've forgotten. My car is 17 years old and gets 35 mpg mixed city/highway. Some got even more (civic HX).
    - Arizhel 9y ago
      The Civic HX would be illegal to sell now because it won't meet crash safety standards. That's the point: you can get a car now that weighs quite a bit more than that HX, performs far better in a crash, has significantly lower emissions, has much more passenger space, and still gets the same fuel economy roughly (i.e. a larger/heavier class of car is getting the same economy as an econocar that's now too small and unsafe to be sold).
  - adrianN 9y ago
    Motors have gotten more efficient, but new cars weigh more. Those things just about cancel out.
    - Arizhel 9y ago
      No, they don't. Look at the fuel economy numbers (and then adjust because the testing methodology has gotten more stringent two times, one just recently and one in 2008 IIRC). New cars are a little heavier, and they still get significantly better economy.
      - adrianN 9y ago
        The last car I drove was built in the early nineties and used about 5l/100km gasoline in the city. There aren't many cars that use less fuel today.
  - Retric 9y ago
    Relatively safe 2002 cars to now is not actually that big a jump in safty. There are some surpingly minor improvemts such as VSA being slightly better at preventing rollover, but that's very much an edge case and generally speaking a rounding error in terms of safety. The only significant new safty feature is automatic breaking but that generally has fairly minimal impact. On the other hand I think many people are more or less waiting for self driving cars, which may not be out soon but make minor improvements seem less relevant.
- douche 9y ago
  From my perspective, newer vehicles are almost strictly worse than models from 20 years ago. There's a lot of complexity and bells and whistles and shoddy construction that I don't appreciate. If I could find a warehouse filled with mint vehicles from, say, 1985, when bodywork was heavy guage steel, and computers were few and far between...
  - rplst8 9y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with the shoddy construction part, but I'm with you on the complexity and bells and whistles. Cars from this era will be super big headaches for classic car guys in 30-40 years. The electronics are so customized that no one will be able to find parts that work. Original restorations will be next to impossible I think, and you already have weird EPA requirements like if you replace the engine in a modern car, you have to replace it with something as good or better emissions wise.
- nradov 9y ago
  The safety improvements in the past 20 years have been huge. In particular crash structures are better at handling side impact and front offset crashes. And front crash technology can now prevent many collisions. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/automation-and-crash-avoidance/topicoverview http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/automation-and-crash-avoid...
  - galdosdi 9y ago
    Many of these same safety "improvements" have also made safety worse for users of other, less expensive vehicles, for cyclists, and for pedestrians, by mandating much higher vehicle weights and larger A pillars that make it harder to see other road users during turns, especially left turns. All this just to avoid crashes that wouldn't happen without the inattention caused by gadgets like automatic transmissions, cruise control, and smartphones. The rich eat the poor.

hueving 9y ago

It seems the last sentence rings true for me an my social circle. I have a 15 year old car that costs me almost nothing because it's paid for and worth so little that I only carry liability insurance. Sure, I could get an awesome new car, but there is absolutely no rational economic reason to do so. Other than missing lane assist and adaptive cruise, I see no useful features that have emerged in cars for nearly 20 years. Electric cars are about it, but the environmental impact of effectively throwing away a perfectly good car to get a new electric car defeats the purpose.

Arizhel 9y ago
>Other than missing lane assist and adaptive cruise, I see no useful features that have emerged in cars for nearly 20 years. You're forgetting fuel economy and crashworthiness. Fuel economy has improved greatly in the last 20 years; I drive a car that 20 years ago with this much power and weight would probably have gotten less than 30mpg on the highway, this one gets 40. Of course, gas prices are low so you might not care about this. But crash protection has also gotten far better in the last 15-20 years. You can walk away from a crash in a modern car that would have maimed or killed you in your 15yo one (even for a car of the same rough size). >Electric cars are about it, but the environmental impact of effectively throwing away a perfectly good car to get a new electric car defeats the purpose. Wrong. You're not "throwing away a perfectly good car", you're reselling that car on the used market to someone else, and in the end (assuming the market doesn't expand) this results eventually in some really old POS car somewhere being junked, which is good because it's pouring out emissions and wasting fuel. More people buying new cars increases the supply of newer cars on the used market, which helps push the oldest and crappiest cars out of usage. Of course, there's limits to this, but the point is: don't feel bad about getting rid of a "perfectly good car"; it's going to continue getting used, just not by you, and theoretically results in another car that really isn't "perfectly good" getting finally retired. The thing that really sucks here is that, in some states at least, you're highly penalized for buying a new or newer car because of personal property taxes. They should just eliminate these taxes for all but luxury vehicles maybe, to encourage people to buy newer cars to improve safety and emissions. There's already a disincentive in higher insurance rates; we don't need to add to that with pointless taxes.
- jwong_ 9y ago
  There was fuel economic cars 15-20 years ago, if you've forgotten. My car is 17 years old and gets 35 mpg mixed city/highway. Some got even more (civic HX).
  - Arizhel 9y ago
    The Civic HX would be illegal to sell now because it won't meet crash safety standards. That's the point: you can get a car now that weighs quite a bit more than that HX, performs far better in a crash, has significantly lower emissions, has much more passenger space, and still gets the same fuel economy roughly (i.e. a larger/heavier class of car is getting the same economy as an econocar that's now too small and unsafe to be sold).
- adrianN 9y ago
  Motors have gotten more efficient, but new cars weigh more. Those things just about cancel out.
  - Arizhel 9y ago
    No, they don't. Look at the fuel economy numbers (and then adjust because the testing methodology has gotten more stringent two times, one just recently and one in 2008 IIRC). New cars are a little heavier, and they still get significantly better economy.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      The last car I drove was built in the early nineties and used about 5l/100km gasoline in the city. There aren't many cars that use less fuel today.
- Retric 9y ago
  Relatively safe 2002 cars to now is not actually that big a jump in safty. There are some surpingly minor improvemts such as VSA being slightly better at preventing rollover, but that's very much an edge case and generally speaking a rounding error in terms of safety. The only significant new safty feature is automatic breaking but that generally has fairly minimal impact. On the other hand I think many people are more or less waiting for self driving cars, which may not be out soon but make minor improvements seem less relevant.
douche 9y ago
From my perspective, newer vehicles are almost strictly worse than models from 20 years ago. There's a lot of complexity and bells and whistles and shoddy construction that I don't appreciate. If I could find a warehouse filled with mint vehicles from, say, 1985, when bodywork was heavy guage steel, and computers were few and far between...
- rplst8 9y ago
  I'm not sure I agree with the shoddy construction part, but I'm with you on the complexity and bells and whistles. Cars from this era will be super big headaches for classic car guys in 30-40 years. The electronics are so customized that no one will be able to find parts that work. Original restorations will be next to impossible I think, and you already have weird EPA requirements like if you replace the engine in a modern car, you have to replace it with something as good or better emissions wise.
nradov 9y ago
The safety improvements in the past 20 years have been huge. In particular crash structures are better at handling side impact and front offset crashes. And front crash technology can now prevent many collisions. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/automation-and-crash-avoidance/topicoverview http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/automation-and-crash-avoid...
- galdosdi 9y ago
  Many of these same safety "improvements" have also made safety worse for users of other, less expensive vehicles, for cyclists, and for pedestrians, by mandating much higher vehicle weights and larger A pillars that make it harder to see other road users during turns, especially left turns. All this just to avoid crashes that wouldn't happen without the inattention caused by gadgets like automatic transmissions, cruise control, and smartphones. The rich eat the poor.