... or, I could go to a World Cup game."
First half of that would be, "I could buy a new car ... "
The other day, I looked at the cars in our driveway and did some quick math.
My wife drives a 2015 Honda CR-V. I drive a 2014 Ford Explorer. Between the two of us, we’re sitting on 23 years of car.
No car payments, no dealership negotiations—and no particular hurry to change that.
Now, a new report suggests we’re trendier than we imagined.
According to the Wall Street Journal, roughly one million prospective customers have simply left the new car market since 2020. By most industry projections, they’re not coming back anytime soon.
Americans were buying around 17 million cars and trucks last decade; analysts now expect something closer to 16 million this year.
Often overlooked but worth noting: the United States also has between 22 and 26 million more residents now than it did back in 2016.
The average new car now runs $50,000. The average age of cars on U.S. roads is 13 years old, a historic high. So our Honda fits right in, and our Ford isn’t far off, either.
“I don’t want to say automakers are OK with this level of sales,” Ivan Drury of Edmunds told the Journal. “But they kind of are.”
The reason: Selling fewer trucks and SUVs at $50,000-plus is more profitable than selling more of yesterday’s cheaper cars.
About a million buyers seem unimpressed by their math.
One frustrated car shopper quoted in the Journal described walking away in sticker shock. Rather than buy new, he concluded he’d “do what everybody else is doing and just hold on to my vehicle as long as I can.”
Granted, our situation might be different if either my wife or I had any kind of commute to speak of. But, we don’t.
We live somewhere with good public transit into the city, Uber covers almost everything else. For airport runs, rideshare is usually faster and comparable in cost to parking.
I bought the Explorer on a whim after one too many days when we both needed a car at the same time.
The Explorer (used) solved that — and, importantly, I could buy it for cash.
As for the Honda, we bought it when my daughter was little. We didn’t have much time to shop, and it came down to the Honda and a couple of other options.
I spent a day counting how many old Hondas, Toyotas, Mazdas, and other makes I saw still on the road.
Let’s not over-complicate this, I thought; just do what everybody else is doing.
Why haven’t we bought a new car since Barack Obama was president? I’d turn my rhetorical question around and ask: Why would we?
Even as the odometers reach six figures, they’re paid off, they require lower insurance payments than newer cars, and they’re in good shape (knock on wood, that’s all I need is to jinx myself).
Sure, they have a few scratches here and there, but that’s a feature, not a bug — you stop caring when someone dings you in a parking lot.
I have zero concern about, for example, leaving it in the garage at MetroPark for probably 12 or 14 hours next week, when I take Amtrak down to Philadelphia for a World Cup game. Come to think about it, the ticket cost me roughly what a car payment likely would, if I had a car payment.
The Ford is particularly good at the things I actually use a car for: long family road trips, ski weekends, hauling gear.
Also, a middle-aged guy can daydream about someday taking a multi-day ski trip camping out of the back of it, even if that probably won’t happen.
Nothing about a $60,000 vehicle with built-in subscriptions, over-the-air updates, and AI-era data collection apparatuses running in the background makes me want to trade up to that.
Also completely absent: any social pressure to do otherwise.
There was a time — I think this was a real thing, not a myth — when people thought the car in your driveway might have said something about where you’d arrived in life. That feeling seems largely gone, at least in my experience.
Nobody is looking at a 2014 Explorer and drawing conclusions.
If they are, I’m happily oblivious — and that’s probably the better deal anyway.
Other things worth knowing …
WSJ Editorial Board: Trump Stages an Iran Retreat: The regime gets financial relief to reopen Hormuz and hold more nuclear talks. “Iran’s new leaders are likely to conclude that Mr. Trump has no desire for more conflict, and they will negotiate accordingly. Congress should scrutinize any final agreement Mr. Trump makes with Iran—and reject it if it props up a regime that still says ‘death to America.’”
NPR: Britain will ban children under 16 from social media platforms including Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and X, following Australia's lead as the first country to impose such a ban. Messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal will not be affected.
CBS News: The FBI disrupted a plot to attack Sunday’s UFC fight night at the White House with explosives-laden drones and gunfire, according to court papers unsealed Tuesday. A 19-year-old Ohio man named in the affidavit, Tycen Proper, allegedly told investigators he intended to “jump-start” a revolution.
MSNBC: Secret Service officials are angry that FBI Director Kash Patel jumped the gun by publicly announcing the case Tuesday on Twitter (née X) before all suspects were in custody, according to three people familiar with the matter.
NPR: G7 leaders pushed Tuesday to bring the war in Ukraine back to the top of Trump's agenda at the summit in France, after months in which the Iran conflict overshadowed it. Hours before the summit opened, Russia fired hundreds of drones and dozens of missiles at Ukrainian cities, killing 11 people.
Democracy Now!: A Ukrainian drone strike set Russia's Moscow oil refinery ablaze Tuesday — a facility that normally supplies nearly half the fuel used in Russia's capital. The attack came one day after Ukraine officially began EU accession negotiations in Luxembourg, a process unlocked after Hungary's new government lifted its longstanding veto on Ukraine's membership bid.
NPR: South African jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim, whose 1974 song "Mannenberg" became an anti-apartheid anthem that reportedly inspired Nelson Mandela during his imprisonment, has died at 91. Ibrahim performed at Mandela's 1994 inauguration; Mandela reportedly called him "our Mozart."
Thanks for reading. I wrote about some of this at Inc.com. See you in the comments.
Robots build better cars than humans as far as precision and consistency is concerned and that's part of the reason why car last longer now than 20 years ago- they come off the assembly line in much better fit and finish and technology has made the engines better.
Another benefit to keeping around a older car, is that for the jurisdictions that charge property taxes on cars the fair market value is lower so your property tax on that car is lower than buying a new car. Another savings.