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> This is not obvious to you? It is very much not obvious to me because it’s not true. Critical safety features like airbags (required by US law in 1999) and

by RC_ITR 4y ago

> This is not obvious to you? It is very much not obvious to me because it’s not true. Critical safety features like airbags (required by US law in 1999) and ABS (required by US law in 2000) were not standard in cars back then, which is a huge incentive to junk a car. Since then, mandatory safety features include traction control (2011) and backup cameras (2018), and idk about you, but I’m fine driving a car without Either of those things, but not ABS or Airbags. Honestly, if you’re going to have such strong opinions about cars, maybe do research into them. And to your amortization point, literally amortization means “cost over useful life” so we agree? And please look at the link on my other comment [0] because that is not how car prices are adjusted by the BLS [0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/new-vehicles.pdf https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/new-vehicles.pdf

thfuran 4y ago
Do you think most people wouldn't get new cars more often if they were free?
lend000 4y ago
It's possible to have many correct points but miss the forest for the trees/argue past each other. I didn't mean that last comment to be condescending, by the way. To my original post (the second part), the BLS primarily measures the spending of people who never save a substantial portion of their income. Vehicles are a necessity for most of these people, so they are going to stretch out the lifetimes of their vehicles if the prices increase relative to their wages. Furthermore, people who might have bought a Camry with some upgrades in 1998 might be relegated to a stock Corolla in 2020. Sure, things are getting nicer all the time, but it's getting easier to make things all the time, too. Technology goes both ways, and at the end of the day, it's still a car. If they took out the rear airbags and removed all of the cheap microcontrollers, would the price really drop 40%? The way the BLS does its survey does not account for preference changes due to price increases. When wealth inequality is constant, it's probably a decent measure. But even then, it's a political metric and the Big Mac index is the best, simple metric we have for true inflation (which has been consistently higher than CPI for decades).

by RC_ITR 4y ago

thfuran 4y ago

Do you think most people wouldn't get new cars more often if they were free?

lend000 4y ago

It's possible to have many correct points but miss the forest for the trees/argue past each other. I didn't mean that last comment to be condescending, by the way. To my original post (the second part), the BLS primarily measures the spending of people who never save a substantial portion of their income. Vehicles are a necessity for most of these people, so they are going to stretch out the lifetimes of their vehicles if the prices increase relative to their wages. Furthermore, people who might have bought a Camry with some upgrades in 1998 might be relegated to a stock Corolla in 2020. Sure, things are getting nicer all the time, but it's getting easier to make things all the time, too. Technology goes both ways, and at the end of the day, it's still a car. If they took out the rear airbags and removed all of the cheap microcontrollers, would the price really drop 40%? The way the BLS does its survey does not account for preference changes due to price increases. When wealth inequality is constant, it's probably a decent measure. But even then, it's a political metric and the Big Mac index is the best, simple metric we have for true inflation (which has been consistently higher than CPI for decades).