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They also incentivize different consumption patterns, such as owning a more fuel efficient car, flying less or installing better isolation in a home. Looking a

They also incentivize different consumption patterns, such as owning a more fuel efficient car, flying less or installing better isolation in a home. Looking at the chart of US Prius sales the last time oil prices went up a lot is really telling

Teknoman117 5y ago
The problem there is that you can’t really save money upgrading to a more fuel efficient car. If you fully own a car (paid off, etc.) there’s not exactly many situations where your new car payment is less than the difference in fuel price. Even if you buy it completely, the break even point is long past the average time an American typically owns any given car. For instance: I drive an 18 year old Ford Expedition (2004). It gets 20 miles per gallon highway if I respect the speed limit and 12 city. My average per tank is about 15 mpg. It’s been paid off for more than a decade. It’s still in good shape will probably last another last another 100k miles before the engine dies. Let’s take a 3 year old used Prius for comparison. Most of my friends who have them tell me their average fuel economy is anywhere from 35 to 40 mpg. You can get a 2018 full size for ~$27k. How far do you have to drive before going from 15 mpg to 40 mpg saves you $27k? If we use the price from the gas station down the street, which is charging $4.40 per gallon for 87 octane, you’d have to drive (27000 / 4.4) * (40 - 15) = 153,409 miles before you broke even. Most cars don’t get to that age before getting destroyed one way or another. If you’re bored of your car, sure, get one that’s better for the environment. But it has not and will not (at least for awhile) make sense (financially) to buy a new car purely based on fuel economy. Edit - for the non-Americans, mpg = miles per gallon, which is our customary unit for fuel efficiency. The larger the number the better. The conversion to L/100km would be 235.214583 / mpg.
- ulrikrasmussen 5y ago
  But the money you spend on a car is not gone as with gas, since the car still has sales value. Isn't a more accurate comparison to compare average gas price per mile + average depreciation per mile?
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    The "value" falls off quickly and dramatically though. Unless you have a desirable car that is well known to be just as good used as new (examples: Tesla, Jeep Wrangler, etc.), the second owner isn’t likely to get much of anything for it. If they bought it used at 3 years old, they probably paid 80% of the price it was new, and the dealer probably paid the original owner 60% of what it was worth new. If they hang onto it long enough to pay off a standard length auto loan (5 years) and drive it for a bit after that, you’re probably looking at a ten year old vehicle. They aren’t worth much to trade in. The dealer will pay you 5% of what it was worth new. At 20 years, be happy that they’re willing to dispose of your car for free. I’d be lucky to get a dealer to give me $2k for my ‘04 expedition, but they’d only give me $5k if it was a ‘12 with half the mileage. That all being said, most cars in the US aren’t replaced because they’re not working or serviceable. People get bored of driving the same car every day. Either that, or they don’t trust a car after an accident, or the insurance company declares your car totaled because they think they can make a profit by fixing it a bit and selling it in a country with less stringent safety requirements. I still drive my SUV because I’m a 6’4 dude who has a lot of trouble finding a comfortable vehicle. Most crossovers have my knees jammed into the dash or the entertainment system.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      > examples: Tesla I am curious how electric car batteries will fare in the long run. Lithium batteries in the computing world (eg. smartphone batteries) are well known to lose charge after a few years. Considering battery is a considerable cost in manufacture/maintenance of an electric car, i'm not sure how that would play out. I guess we'll have to wait another decade to find out whether that's a disaster or not.
      - Teknoman117 5y ago
        I shot myself in the foot there a bit. I was really thinking "used cars that sell for so close to what they cost new you might as well buy the new one" (Tesla) and I mentally leaped to "that should mean the car is built so well, being a few years old should cause any wear worth mentioning" (I.e. well built off-road capable vehicle that 90% of owners purchased to merely masquerade as someone who does things that justify owning one) I too wonder what the range loss will do to the value over time. If lithium doesn’t get substantially more expensive, I know that for the Nissan Leaf my parents owned, getting a new battery + the labor was like $4,000. Admittedly the Tesla battery has 3x higher capacity, but I don’t know much that actually effects the end price after accounting for all of the other stuff that goes into those packs.
- VintageCool 5y ago
  Eventually, your car will die. Or the cost of maintenance will exceed the value of the car. At that time, you'll likely consider buying a car to replace it. If gas prices are high when the time comes for you to replace your car, then you're more likely to take fuel consumption into consideration and buy a hybrid (or EV). The point is not to replace your perfectly fine existing car with a fuel efficient vehicle; the point is that if you're going to buy a car anyway then it makes sense to consider the next 15 years of fuel costs and carbon emissions.
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    Right. But even the whole "maintenance exceeds the value of your car" thing is a bit murky. Taking a car worth $2k and paying $4k to have the power train replaced with a new one isn’t going to make it worth $6k, sure. But if that means your car will last another 200k miles and you aren’t bothered by driving a vehicle that old, you’re still coming out on top. I think that mostly comes from advice saying "look, if you’re like most other people, you’ll get bored of the car before what you’re replacing fails. So you’re just throwing money into the fire if you sell it in the next few years".
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > Or the cost of maintenance will exceed the value of the car. How do you measure the value of the used car? In all cases, it's very unlikely that the cost of maintenance will ever exceed the value of a brand new car. If it ever does, it sure is a demonstration of planned obsolescence (voluntary bad engineering to push sales). > If gas prices are high when the time comes for you to replace your car, then you're more likely to take fuel consumption into consideration and buy a hybrid (or EV). Not sure about that. Manufacturing cars, whether electric or gasoline-based, takes considerable amounts of fuel from extraction of materials to assembly to distribution. Higher fuel prices means higher parts prices overall, and the reason we have cheap electronics is because they're manufactured in China where energy is cheap and local governments mostly don't care about pollution. I have yet to see a study comparing the amount of fossil fuel necessary to produce electric vs ignition cars, but in the "renewable" energy world the picture isn't as clear cut as you suggest. As much as i dislike the director, "Planet of the humans" documentary has interesting overview of that topic.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  I entirely agree with your analysis, the "new car efficiency" pitch is outright propaganda from the industry, pretty much like in the PC world where running old machines is usually (unless running 24/7 at full power) much more energy-efficient (and cheaper) than buying a new one. Just wanted to point out "mpg" and other american-centric units left me confused and i had to look it up. Spelling it out would have helped me understand, coming from Europe where we used standard decimal units. For anecdote, the domain where Europe doesn't use a decimal system is time. A decimal calendar was introduced during the French revolution, but shortly removed from history (like many other progresses of that era): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    That’s fair. I had written it out initially, but it ended up appearing enough times it felt redundant. I should still have know better though, considering I work with a bunch of European expats who constantly poke at me for it. I then have to remind them that Fahrenheit was a Polish born German living in the Netherlands at the time he came up with the unit :)

Teknoman117 5y ago

The problem there is that you can’t really save money upgrading to a more fuel efficient car. If you fully own a car (paid off, etc.) there’s not exactly many situations where your new car payment is less than the difference in fuel price. Even if you buy it completely, the break even point is long past the average time an American typically owns any given car. For instance: I drive an 18 year old Ford Expedition (2004). It gets 20 miles per gallon highway if I respect the speed limit and 12 city. My average per tank is about 15 mpg. It’s been paid off for more than a decade. It’s still in good shape will probably last another last another 100k miles before the engine dies. Let’s take a 3 year old used Prius for comparison. Most of my friends who have them tell me their average fuel economy is anywhere from 35 to 40 mpg. You can get a 2018 full size for ~$27k. How far do you have to drive before going from 15 mpg to 40 mpg saves you $27k? If we use the price from the gas station down the street, which is charging $4.40 per gallon for 87 octane, you’d have to drive (27000 / 4.4) * (40 - 15) = 153,409 miles before you broke even. Most cars don’t get to that age before getting destroyed one way or another. If you’re bored of your car, sure, get one that’s better for the environment. But it has not and will not (at least for awhile) make sense (financially) to buy a new car purely based on fuel economy. Edit - for the non-Americans, mpg = miles per gallon, which is our customary unit for fuel efficiency. The larger the number the better. The conversion to L/100km would be 235.214583 / mpg.

ulrikrasmussen 5y ago
But the money you spend on a car is not gone as with gas, since the car still has sales value. Isn't a more accurate comparison to compare average gas price per mile + average depreciation per mile?
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  The "value" falls off quickly and dramatically though. Unless you have a desirable car that is well known to be just as good used as new (examples: Tesla, Jeep Wrangler, etc.), the second owner isn’t likely to get much of anything for it. If they bought it used at 3 years old, they probably paid 80% of the price it was new, and the dealer probably paid the original owner 60% of what it was worth new. If they hang onto it long enough to pay off a standard length auto loan (5 years) and drive it for a bit after that, you’re probably looking at a ten year old vehicle. They aren’t worth much to trade in. The dealer will pay you 5% of what it was worth new. At 20 years, be happy that they’re willing to dispose of your car for free. I’d be lucky to get a dealer to give me $2k for my ‘04 expedition, but they’d only give me $5k if it was a ‘12 with half the mileage. That all being said, most cars in the US aren’t replaced because they’re not working or serviceable. People get bored of driving the same car every day. Either that, or they don’t trust a car after an accident, or the insurance company declares your car totaled because they think they can make a profit by fixing it a bit and selling it in a country with less stringent safety requirements. I still drive my SUV because I’m a 6’4 dude who has a lot of trouble finding a comfortable vehicle. Most crossovers have my knees jammed into the dash or the entertainment system.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    > examples: Tesla I am curious how electric car batteries will fare in the long run. Lithium batteries in the computing world (eg. smartphone batteries) are well known to lose charge after a few years. Considering battery is a considerable cost in manufacture/maintenance of an electric car, i'm not sure how that would play out. I guess we'll have to wait another decade to find out whether that's a disaster or not.
    - Teknoman117 5y ago
      I shot myself in the foot there a bit. I was really thinking "used cars that sell for so close to what they cost new you might as well buy the new one" (Tesla) and I mentally leaped to "that should mean the car is built so well, being a few years old should cause any wear worth mentioning" (I.e. well built off-road capable vehicle that 90% of owners purchased to merely masquerade as someone who does things that justify owning one) I too wonder what the range loss will do to the value over time. If lithium doesn’t get substantially more expensive, I know that for the Nissan Leaf my parents owned, getting a new battery + the labor was like $4,000. Admittedly the Tesla battery has 3x higher capacity, but I don’t know much that actually effects the end price after accounting for all of the other stuff that goes into those packs.
VintageCool 5y ago
Eventually, your car will die. Or the cost of maintenance will exceed the value of the car. At that time, you'll likely consider buying a car to replace it. If gas prices are high when the time comes for you to replace your car, then you're more likely to take fuel consumption into consideration and buy a hybrid (or EV). The point is not to replace your perfectly fine existing car with a fuel efficient vehicle; the point is that if you're going to buy a car anyway then it makes sense to consider the next 15 years of fuel costs and carbon emissions.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  Right. But even the whole "maintenance exceeds the value of your car" thing is a bit murky. Taking a car worth $2k and paying $4k to have the power train replaced with a new one isn’t going to make it worth $6k, sure. But if that means your car will last another 200k miles and you aren’t bothered by driving a vehicle that old, you’re still coming out on top. I think that mostly comes from advice saying "look, if you’re like most other people, you’ll get bored of the car before what you’re replacing fails. So you’re just throwing money into the fire if you sell it in the next few years".
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > Or the cost of maintenance will exceed the value of the car. How do you measure the value of the used car? In all cases, it's very unlikely that the cost of maintenance will ever exceed the value of a brand new car. If it ever does, it sure is a demonstration of planned obsolescence (voluntary bad engineering to push sales). > If gas prices are high when the time comes for you to replace your car, then you're more likely to take fuel consumption into consideration and buy a hybrid (or EV). Not sure about that. Manufacturing cars, whether electric or gasoline-based, takes considerable amounts of fuel from extraction of materials to assembly to distribution. Higher fuel prices means higher parts prices overall, and the reason we have cheap electronics is because they're manufactured in China where energy is cheap and local governments mostly don't care about pollution. I have yet to see a study comparing the amount of fossil fuel necessary to produce electric vs ignition cars, but in the "renewable" energy world the picture isn't as clear cut as you suggest. As much as i dislike the director, "Planet of the humans" documentary has interesting overview of that topic.
southerntofu 5y ago
I entirely agree with your analysis, the "new car efficiency" pitch is outright propaganda from the industry, pretty much like in the PC world where running old machines is usually (unless running 24/7 at full power) much more energy-efficient (and cheaper) than buying a new one. Just wanted to point out "mpg" and other american-centric units left me confused and i had to look it up. Spelling it out would have helped me understand, coming from Europe where we used standard decimal units. For anecdote, the domain where Europe doesn't use a decimal system is time. A decimal calendar was introduced during the French revolution, but shortly removed from history (like many other progresses of that era): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  That’s fair. I had written it out initially, but it ended up appearing enough times it felt redundant. I should still have know better though, considering I work with a bunch of European expats who constantly poke at me for it. I then have to remind them that Fahrenheit was a Polish born German living in the Netherlands at the time he came up with the unit :)