Another headline today:
Really? Naturally this got me curious, especially since I was pretty sure I knew the answer. Here are new vehicle sales:
From 2000 through the beginning of 2020, unit sales clock in at an annualized rate of 16.13 million. For the last 12 months sales have averaged 16.15 million. There's no decline.
As it happens, most of the article is just a bitch session among enthusiasts about how new cars can't hold a candle to old cars. The old ones had V-8s, stick shifts, knobs instead of touch screens, etc. etc.
Fine. Nothing wrong with bitching. But if you're going to say that unhappiness about new cars is widespread enough to cut into sales, you should check first to see if sales are actually down.
As an unrepentant urbanite, I haven't owned a car this century. Rent one about once a month on average. As I ponder a possible move to a locale with more primitive notions of civic investment, one part of that would be buying a vehicle. I just really want a ca. 2000 Honda Civic.
Just a reliable, cheap car. No Ipad replacing all the controls. No baked-in surveillance. No bullshit sell-you-the-seat-heater-and-then-rent-the-controls.
I really don't know what I'm going to end up with. But I do know I'm an old man now, cars these days are user-hostile trash.
I agree, cars are appliances. I truly don't understand people who buy $90k cars, when there are cars on the market that can get you from A to B at 1/4 the cost, near-equal comfort, and *greater* reliability.
There are 2 kinds of car people. Those who a car makes a difference to, and those who it doesn't.
Neither truly understands the other. To illustrate, I read your comment and frankly, it sounds bonkers to me that you can't understand the difference. We might as well be talking different languages to each other.
That being said - you can't buy an unreliable car in the sense that it won't start or make it to your destination. A fancy-dancy car might be in the shop more, but it's not *unreliable*. But the older a car gets, the more likely you'll have something crap out. Say, your alternator or fuel pump somewhere around 150K miles. So it's a real stretch to say cars get more reliable as they get older. But they don't get very much less. Any car made in the last 20 years is pretty damn amazing.
"Any car made in the last 20 years is pretty damn amazing."
Agreed. So you might as well buy a cheap one and not an expensive one.
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As an unrepentant ruralite, I understand that public transit on roads used by a few hundred people a day is not a sensible civic investment. It's true that some of the carmakers have gotten overenthusiastic about the idea of leasing rather than selling things like seat heaters (mind you, seat heaters themselves are new tech; my friend's dad's Cadillac didn't have them when I was a kid). It's also true that they've gotten overenthusiastic about eliminating buttons, switches and dials, but fads in car design have been around forever; I understand buttons are making a comeback.
My 2017 Honda Civic has seat heaters. They're really nice on cold mornings. We liked them so much, that we got a pair of seat heaters to use on our couch on cold mornings. They get nice and warm and don't draw a lot of power like a space heater.
They misinterpreted the stats. The key is, people are holding onto their vehicles for longer. Even as the population is growing, total car sales volume isn't keeping up.
Whether that's a function of cost alone or in combination with the steady increase long-term reliability, it's not clear.
https://www.spglobal.com/mobility/en/research-analysis/average-age-vehicles-united-states-2024.html
I wonder how many people have deferred buying in the hope EVs will become cheaper and more practical within a few years.
Well, there are cheap used EVs especially with the new tax credit.
https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/used-clean-vehicle-credit
But at least people are deferring purchases to save up the money to buy a brand new EV, if not for a more affordable model slated to hit either in 2025 or 2026. I can foresee problems though, because if those more affordable models are popular, dealers are going to mark up the price.
Seat heaters (and steering wheel heaters) make good sense on EV’s which unlike IC cars don’t give off an abundance of wasted heat energy which can be used to warm the car. Heating the whole car reduces an EV’s range significantly, heating just the surfaces you touch has a much smaller effect on range.
Long term reliability has definitely improved a lot over the last 50 years; I don't know about over the last 20 years.
The last time I checked, my car service guy told me that spark plugs last 100,000 miles. I remember changing or at least regapping the damned things every 20,000. I still have my gapping tool which I use for my lawn mower.
I recall replacing plugs, points and condenser every 10,000 miles, oil changes every 3,000 miles. The car I'm driving now is 16 years old and has 150,000 miles on it. It had new plugs at 100,000 miles and gets an oil change every 10,000 miles. Those cars with the 3,000 mile oil changes were generally pretty much worn out at 100,000 miles. My car is doing just fine and is likely good for another 100,000 miles, at least.
Remember when cars used to rust like crazy? I don't miss those days.
The New York judge overseeing Donald Trump's hush money trial has asked attorneys in the case about a social media post purporting to preview the former president's guilty verdict.
“Today, the Court became aware of a comment that was posted on the Unified Court System’s public Facebook page and which I now bring to your attention,” Judge Juan Merchan wrote in a letter dated Friday.
“My cousin is a juror and said Trump is getting convicted,” the post stated, according to Merchan's letter. “Thank you folks for all your hard work!!!!”
Merchan said that the comment, which was attributed to a user identified as Michael Anderson, was "now labeled as one week old," and was posted in response to a routine notice from the court posted on May 29 about oral arguments unrelated to proceedings in Trump’s case.
When a defendant who has been convicted by a jury but has not yet been sentenced learns of alleged jury misconduct, he can move to set aside the verdict under New York criminal procedure law. If a defendant can prove that jury misconduct “may have affected a substantial right of the defendant,” the remedy is a new trial.
NBC News has not verified the claims made in the comment or the identity of the user who published the post, which has since been deleted. NBC News also hasn't independently confirmed the comment’s existence.
A Trump campaign official said "we're investigating" when asked about Merchan's letter.
Attorneys for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday afternoon, nor did a spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney's office.
Any chance Michael Anderson might be related to John Baron?
Are you going to believe someone who posts under the moniker “shitposter”? Only if you’re a Republican.
Shouldn't that be per capita though?
I was coming in to say the same. If we look at 2000, pop 280M, car sales of 17.5M we get 0.0625 car purchases per capita. 2024, pop 341M, car sales of 16.15M, we get 0.0473 car purchases per capita. This is a drop of 24.2%.
So yes, long term it does look like a drop. Year over year, not so much.
Yes, you'd think a man who frequently deplores financial data that hasn't been adjusted for inflation would be the first to see the flaws in making a trend line from raw total sales over the years.
The big variations in the data over 24 years also make an annualised average of dubious value. It's clear that if you deleted the years when Americans were in or recovering from a recession, and only considered periods similar to today, sales are significantly below what one would expect.
It certainly looks like the post-pandemic average is below the pre-Great Recession average, even though there were fewer people in the US then.
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Used car prices are so high these days that new ones can be a relative bargain.
My gripe: black interiors are hot and always look dirty.
Agreed. We are in the market for a gently used hybrid and prices are so high we will probably buy new. There is a surplus of hybrids only a few years old but very high mileage (ride shares I assume).
Assholes can still buy V-8's, but they cost a bundle because the supply of assholes seems to increase every year, while the supply of V-8's shrinks.
Now it's absolutely true that the car companies COULD make and sell lots more V-8's but the EPA has made that an extremely expensive proposition.
So here we are, trapped in cars that are not just itching to correct our lane-keeping and braking nous, but want to plan the whole damn trip and make the reservations!
You never know if your car has been suborned by Wyndham to put you in a Super 8 every night.....
Satire?
Like most new cars (even though it's eight years old) my car has all the lane keeping/auto braking/rear cross traffic warning etc. stuff. None of it is intrusive, and adaptive cruise control is fantastic.
The WSJ article was in the "Lifestyle" section. 'nuff said.
Exactly. It was a car guy article by their car guy. These people actually enjoy driving and want cars that satisfy their car bug. They like fussing with manual transmissions, exploring levels of oversteer, enjoy good, distinctive styling, get pissed at millisecond response delays and so on. They are not me, but I can understand how they feel. Some people are like this about music or food or new outfits or computers.
In some ways they are right. Modern cars have all converged in appearance as dictated by the results of wind tunnel and crash tests. They have the same upmarket features. No scoops there. Handling is all done in software, so if you want an easy ride, tap the touch screen - yes those suck. If you want a sportier drive, tap the touch screen.
P.S. Motorsport, maybe twenty years ago, took a Honda minivan to a test track to try it out against a Porsche 356 and a Jaguar XKE, both classic sports cars. The Honda came out on top on the slalom timing. Remember, this was 20 years ago and this was a minivan, not an SUV or the like. Search for "soccer mom's revenge motorsport". It's still online.
On eyeballing the graph, it looks like car sales are now down about 10% from before the pandemic. The 2010s had sales of about 18M while the 2000s were about 16M, which would be simple population growth. Current sales in 2020s really do look down.
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