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https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/average-age-of-vehicles-in-the-us-increases-to-122-years.html https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/resear

https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/average-age-of-vehicles-in-the-us-increases-to-122-years.html https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/avera... The opposite. With cars reaching much more advanced ages today, when a collision happens it's a write-off. The modern car isn't 'disposable'. In fact, all statistics point to us holding onto cars longer today than ever before. Today's cars are the most durable that they've ever been.

dsalfdslfdsa 2y ago
The OP's article was careful to make this distinction, and I think it's very interesting (as well as being the crucial point of the article). Cars are now more reliable and last longer, but when they do develop a problem, it's less economically viable to repair them.
- dragontamer 2y ago
  The definition of 'Totaled' is when a comparable car on the used market can replace your vehicle for less than or equal to the repair costs. As such, it makes no sense to repair a totaled vehicle. You should instead buy a comparable used vehicle. But saying the word 'Disposable' is pretty bad with regards to the headline. It doesn't capture the full effect of what the stats are showing. That is, we are all keeping vehicles for longer. Longer miles, longer life. Repair costs for old vehicles always grows as old parts tend to be harder to find (factories have shifted production to newer vehicles. So you are forced to look for scrap). Meanwhile, older cars lose more and more value as they age.
  - StableAlkyne 2y ago
    > As such, it makes no sense to repair a totaled vehicle. You should instead buy a comparable used vehicle. I sometimes wonder how much the carbon footprint of the auto industry would change if people preferred to fix them instead of throwing the whole thing away just because of a fender bender or an expensive part broke
    - sokoloff 2y ago
      Our CR-V was rear-ended. It's a great car and it's pretty likely to be totaled because the cost of repairs is going to end up being higher than the insurance company is willing to pay. (And then I expect it's going to be a massive fight for me to get paid enough to replace it like-for-like, but that's a separate issue from the overall footprint.) I don't see any reasonable way around this, though. If I have a car that I could replace for $8K plus the cost of replicating some mods [CarPlay head unit, tow hitch, and heated seats] and would salvage for $1K, I can't reasonably expect someone else's insurance company to pay $12.5K in costs (for repairs plus rentals/loss of use plus diminished value plus incidentals) to put me back in a place where I then have a crash-repaired car worth $7K plus $1K in cash in my pocket for diminished value. What other carbon reduction could be bought for that extra $3K in costs vs. repairing our damaged car? From the at-fault driver's and their insurance company's point of view: the driver's negligence caused around $8-9K of direct damages to me plus several hundred in incidental/related expenses. That's what the driver is liable for (and the insurance company on the hook to cover as per their agreement), not a $12+K figure for a liability for damages amount that was thousands lower.
      - kd5bjo 2y ago
        > I don't see any reasonable way around this, though. If I have a car that I could replace for $8K and would salvage for $1K, I can't reasonably expect someone else's insurance company to pay $12.5K in costs (for repairs plus rentals/loss of use plus diminished value plus incidentals) to put me back in a place where I then have a crash-repaired car worth $7K plus $1K in cash in my pocket for diminished value. The problem with that logic is the assumption that the car can be replaced for $8K. To some (maybe most) people, cars are non-fungible and there is a significant amount of personal, non-transferrable value in one particular vehicle, due e.g. to the memories acquired in connection with it. Part of the reason that people get upset when the insurance company decides to declare their car totaled is that the replacement value offered is significantly lower than they would have accepted for the car had it not been in an accident-- The actuarial value assigned isn't properly valuing the intangibles. Edit to add: Or, in other words, if the market-clearing price of "comparable" vehicles represented the actual value of the car to its owner, the car would have already been on the used market. The fact that it wasn't signals that there must be some premium over the market price that's necessary to make the owner whole.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    As GP said, the author recognized that people are keeping cars longer and that they are more durable. However a new wrinkle is that "the proportion of brand new vehicles being written off has increased." This is due to the costs of repairing "Advanced Driver Assistance Systems” such as automatic braking and lane-keeping assistance. These systems include sensors, cameras, and other equipment that must be carefully calibrated, which adds a lot of skilled labor costs to the repairs. It's no longer the case that a repair is just hammering out dents and spraying some paint.
    - cratermoon 2y ago
      Any collision that sets of the airbags in a modern car is almost guaranteed to be a write-off.
      - SoftTalker 2y ago
        Yep, they are surprisingly complex and expensive sensor-controlled devices, and a modern car might have a dozen of them. Just their replacement alone will be thousands of dollars, on top of the actual collision repair work.
        cratermoon 2y ago
        Plus each airbag has a small explosive charge, which requires special and expensive handling.
    - emmelaich 2y ago
      I've spoken to a number of people lately that have had to take their Audi/VW/Mercedes/ other to the shop for repair because of the electronics. One was charged thousands to fix a snow sensor. We don't get snow in Sydney. Guy who runs a fleet of luxury vehicles said the sensors are cheap and simply fail after five or so years. My own VW Passat randomly failed to start occasionally with some mysterious light on. (I forget the details). I sold it.
  - nradov 2y ago
    It makes sense to repair a totaled vehicle if you can do most of the repair work yourself instead of paying the market rate. A friend has an older Volkswagen Jetta that was hit from behind at an intersection. There was no frame damage or airbag deployment but the insurance company totaled it because inflation has driven labor charges for simple repairs to ridiculous levels. My friend took the insurance payout and repaired it himself using a junkyard bumper. Works fine. But he had more free time and better mechanical skills than most people.
    - sokoloff 2y ago
      That also works well when you are willing to accept less than fully restoring the car to the pre-accident condition. Many people are happy to have a mismatched bumper or hood in exchange for $700 in their pocket.
  - kube-system 2y ago
    > The definition of 'Totaled' is when a comparable car on the used market can replace your vehicle for less than or equal to the repair costs. Only in Texas and Colorado. Almost all states require cars to be declared a total loss before that. The most common definitions are 1. The Total Loss Formula, which is when the value of the car is less than or equal to the repair costs plus the salvage value of the vehicle 2. 75% threshold -- which is when the repair costs are 75% of the price to replace your vehicle https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/total-loss-thresholds.aspx https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/total-loss-thresholds....
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  I can't get the link to work at the moment so I was wondering: are the stats being covered here including or excluding EVs? I've read elsewhere that EV repair costs are artificially high due to various other factors surrounding the manufacture and distribution of their parts versus ICE vehicles, not only but especially the batteries being SO expensive that it borderline out-prices a new car.
- SkyPuncher 2y ago
  This has largely become my wife and is attitude. We generally get about 8 years out of a car before we start running into larger repairs. This tends to become the point we decide to trade it in for something new.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  isn't it the more economically viable thing to not have to make any repairs?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
skhunted 2y ago
What do you think about Cubans keeping cars from 1950s running for as long as they did? It seems to me that maybe we live in a society that is overly permissive of replacing items.
- a1371 2y ago
  This kind of argument ignores the real cost of having to upkeep a 50s car: the human suffering. Cubans are forced to use this option and their society suffers from it.
  - skhunted 2y ago
    From an environmental perspective it’s a good thing. Don’t know if that makes it worth it but we are creating far too much pollution.
    - constantcrying 2y ago
      Cars from the 50s are less energy efficient and require more overall resources to maintain than a new car. They are also significantly less safe.
      - skhunted 2y ago
        I imagine the mining of materials, waste from discarded car, etc. makes up for these things but I don’t know. I do think overall we are a very wasteful society and we cause way too much pollution.
        bluGill 2y ago
        A scrapped car is recycled for the metals in it. So if you recycle the old car you can count much less costs against the new car.
    - babypuncher 2y ago
      Keeping an old car functioning is only better for the environment up to a certain point. If your cars are staying on the road long enough, eventually it makes more environmental sense to replace a 50 year old car that gets 18 miles per gallon with a new one that gets 45 and can last another 50 years.
francisofascii 2y ago
Cars can be both disposable, but also true we keep them longer. For example, my car's TPMS tire pressure gauge battery died, but the battery is internal to the system and isn't designed to replace the battery. So a repair/replacement is $600-900. But I am not replacing the car or getting the repair. I am simply living with the warning light on.
Rapzid 2y ago
This is really good. The energy use for fabricating a car must be huge.
babypuncher 2y ago
It's been something of a give and take. Modern cars are significantly more reliable than they used to be, often going 150k miles without any issues beyond regular maintenance. But when they do break, repairs are a lot more costly.

dsalfdslfdsa 2y ago

The OP's article was careful to make this distinction, and I think it's very interesting (as well as being the crucial point of the article). Cars are now more reliable and last longer, but when they do develop a problem, it's less economically viable to repair them.

dragontamer 2y ago
The definition of 'Totaled' is when a comparable car on the used market can replace your vehicle for less than or equal to the repair costs. As such, it makes no sense to repair a totaled vehicle. You should instead buy a comparable used vehicle. But saying the word 'Disposable' is pretty bad with regards to the headline. It doesn't capture the full effect of what the stats are showing. That is, we are all keeping vehicles for longer. Longer miles, longer life. Repair costs for old vehicles always grows as old parts tend to be harder to find (factories have shifted production to newer vehicles. So you are forced to look for scrap). Meanwhile, older cars lose more and more value as they age.
- StableAlkyne 2y ago
  > As such, it makes no sense to repair a totaled vehicle. You should instead buy a comparable used vehicle. I sometimes wonder how much the carbon footprint of the auto industry would change if people preferred to fix them instead of throwing the whole thing away just because of a fender bender or an expensive part broke
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    Our CR-V was rear-ended. It's a great car and it's pretty likely to be totaled because the cost of repairs is going to end up being higher than the insurance company is willing to pay. (And then I expect it's going to be a massive fight for me to get paid enough to replace it like-for-like, but that's a separate issue from the overall footprint.) I don't see any reasonable way around this, though. If I have a car that I could replace for $8K plus the cost of replicating some mods [CarPlay head unit, tow hitch, and heated seats] and would salvage for $1K, I can't reasonably expect someone else's insurance company to pay $12.5K in costs (for repairs plus rentals/loss of use plus diminished value plus incidentals) to put me back in a place where I then have a crash-repaired car worth $7K plus $1K in cash in my pocket for diminished value. What other carbon reduction could be bought for that extra $3K in costs vs. repairing our damaged car? From the at-fault driver's and their insurance company's point of view: the driver's negligence caused around $8-9K of direct damages to me plus several hundred in incidental/related expenses. That's what the driver is liable for (and the insurance company on the hook to cover as per their agreement), not a $12+K figure for a liability for damages amount that was thousands lower.
    - kd5bjo 2y ago
      > I don't see any reasonable way around this, though. If I have a car that I could replace for $8K and would salvage for $1K, I can't reasonably expect someone else's insurance company to pay $12.5K in costs (for repairs plus rentals/loss of use plus diminished value plus incidentals) to put me back in a place where I then have a crash-repaired car worth $7K plus $1K in cash in my pocket for diminished value. The problem with that logic is the assumption that the car can be replaced for $8K. To some (maybe most) people, cars are non-fungible and there is a significant amount of personal, non-transferrable value in one particular vehicle, due e.g. to the memories acquired in connection with it. Part of the reason that people get upset when the insurance company decides to declare their car totaled is that the replacement value offered is significantly lower than they would have accepted for the car had it not been in an accident-- The actuarial value assigned isn't properly valuing the intangibles. Edit to add: Or, in other words, if the market-clearing price of "comparable" vehicles represented the actual value of the car to its owner, the car would have already been on the used market. The fact that it wasn't signals that there must be some premium over the market price that's necessary to make the owner whole.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  As GP said, the author recognized that people are keeping cars longer and that they are more durable. However a new wrinkle is that "the proportion of brand new vehicles being written off has increased." This is due to the costs of repairing "Advanced Driver Assistance Systems” such as automatic braking and lane-keeping assistance. These systems include sensors, cameras, and other equipment that must be carefully calibrated, which adds a lot of skilled labor costs to the repairs. It's no longer the case that a repair is just hammering out dents and spraying some paint.
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    Any collision that sets of the airbags in a modern car is almost guaranteed to be a write-off.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      Yep, they are surprisingly complex and expensive sensor-controlled devices, and a modern car might have a dozen of them. Just their replacement alone will be thousands of dollars, on top of the actual collision repair work.
      - cratermoon 2y ago
        Plus each airbag has a small explosive charge, which requires special and expensive handling.
  - emmelaich 2y ago
    I've spoken to a number of people lately that have had to take their Audi/VW/Mercedes/ other to the shop for repair because of the electronics. One was charged thousands to fix a snow sensor. We don't get snow in Sydney. Guy who runs a fleet of luxury vehicles said the sensors are cheap and simply fail after five or so years. My own VW Passat randomly failed to start occasionally with some mysterious light on. (I forget the details). I sold it.
- nradov 2y ago
  It makes sense to repair a totaled vehicle if you can do most of the repair work yourself instead of paying the market rate. A friend has an older Volkswagen Jetta that was hit from behind at an intersection. There was no frame damage or airbag deployment but the insurance company totaled it because inflation has driven labor charges for simple repairs to ridiculous levels. My friend took the insurance payout and repaired it himself using a junkyard bumper. Works fine. But he had more free time and better mechanical skills than most people.
  - sokoloff 2y ago
    That also works well when you are willing to accept less than fully restoring the car to the pre-accident condition. Many people are happy to have a mismatched bumper or hood in exchange for $700 in their pocket.
- kube-system 2y ago
  > The definition of 'Totaled' is when a comparable car on the used market can replace your vehicle for less than or equal to the repair costs. Only in Texas and Colorado. Almost all states require cars to be declared a total loss before that. The most common definitions are 1. The Total Loss Formula, which is when the value of the car is less than or equal to the repair costs plus the salvage value of the vehicle 2. 75% threshold -- which is when the repair costs are 75% of the price to replace your vehicle https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/total-loss-thresholds.aspx https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/total-loss-thresholds....
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
I can't get the link to work at the moment so I was wondering: are the stats being covered here including or excluding EVs? I've read elsewhere that EV repair costs are artificially high due to various other factors surrounding the manufacture and distribution of their parts versus ICE vehicles, not only but especially the batteries being SO expensive that it borderline out-prices a new car.
SkyPuncher 2y ago
This has largely become my wife and is attitude. We generally get about 8 years out of a car before we start running into larger repairs. This tends to become the point we decide to trade it in for something new.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
isn't it the more economically viable thing to not have to make any repairs?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

skhunted 2y ago

What do you think about Cubans keeping cars from 1950s running for as long as they did? It seems to me that maybe we live in a society that is overly permissive of replacing items.

a1371 2y ago
This kind of argument ignores the real cost of having to upkeep a 50s car: the human suffering. Cubans are forced to use this option and their society suffers from it.
- skhunted 2y ago
  From an environmental perspective it’s a good thing. Don’t know if that makes it worth it but we are creating far too much pollution.
  - constantcrying 2y ago
    Cars from the 50s are less energy efficient and require more overall resources to maintain than a new car. They are also significantly less safe.
    - skhunted 2y ago
      I imagine the mining of materials, waste from discarded car, etc. makes up for these things but I don’t know. I do think overall we are a very wasteful society and we cause way too much pollution.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        A scrapped car is recycled for the metals in it. So if you recycle the old car you can count much less costs against the new car.
  - babypuncher 2y ago
    Keeping an old car functioning is only better for the environment up to a certain point. If your cars are staying on the road long enough, eventually it makes more environmental sense to replace a 50 year old car that gets 18 miles per gallon with a new one that gets 45 and can last another 50 years.

francisofascii 2y ago

Cars can be both disposable, but also true we keep them longer. For example, my car's TPMS tire pressure gauge battery died, but the battery is internal to the system and isn't designed to replace the battery. So a repair/replacement is $600-900. But I am not replacing the car or getting the repair. I am simply living with the warning light on.

Rapzid 2y ago

This is really good. The energy use for fabricating a car must be huge.

babypuncher 2y ago

It's been something of a give and take. Modern cars are significantly more reliable than they used to be, often going 150k miles without any issues beyond regular maintenance. But when they do break, repairs are a lot more costly.