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It's not really that they're older, it's that they're worn out; local asking price is 7000 dollars for cars with 140,000 miles on the clock (it is unusual to see anything under 100,000 at that price). 10 years ago, 7000 dollars was the basic asking price, for a "normal" compact car, with a third to half of that mileage.
Of course, the supply of new cars dried up in around 2016 since the American manufacturers stopped making them entirely for a variety of reasons (a negative real interest rate encourages you to buy a massive truck instead), but the other automakers didn't suddenly start making more cars and just raised their prices for a slightly more complicated (but not necessarily better) car.
And then there's the "it will be illegal to make a normal car in 2035, affecting ~95% of cars sold new today" thing (to say nothing of the environmental regulations that are inherently harder for small cars to pass) that means that, unless you're a Japanese or maybe South Korean company, you aren't putting any new R&D or spinning up manufacturing capacity for compact or subcompact cars (electric cars have to be as large as SUVs, because if they aren't they only have 160 miles of reliable range, and probably aren't passing the crash tests either).
Of course, I'm sure you could just move closer to work, but conveniently there's also a housing shortage, brought to you by the same people who manufactured the car shortage. The streetcar conspiracy, but in reverse.
That seems very, very high, you can go online and find cars with fewer miles than that in reasonable working order for a quarter the price.
Which people do you suspect of manufacturing both of these things?
No, you can't. The cheapest online offering for anything that can reasonably be expected to last 10 years is running 11,000-12,500. For reference, those exact same kinds of cars sold new in 2012 for 16,000 (and would last 20 years if bought new).
As such, inflation with respect to reliable personal transport is roughly 100%. Carmakers literally just decided to stop making compact cars and I don't think "lack of demand" is telling the whole story; SUVs and megatrucks get breaks on emissions since US regulations get laxer as the vehicle gets larger (so it's impossible to beat European and Japanese carmakers on price, since US carmakers have never been able to compete on quality and EU/JP cars are already making a profit since development on their small cars are justified as they're the only thing they're even allowed to sell domestically).
"Much like what happens if we tax the absolute shit out of/entirely prohibit outwards development, if we make cars more expensive by making sure it's impossible to make a cheap car through safety/environmental regulations (even though doing so objectively makes the roads less safe and results in a net emissions increase in the near-term; SUVs are worse than cars at both), this makes it less likely the average citizen will be able to afford property, so they'll have to rent from us. This pushes rents higher and
saves the environmentmakes us richer."More options
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