Are these really the problem? I feel like new cars are obscenely expensive right now. Even a basic car can easily run you 30-40k, the same thing a few years used will be <20k, and a few years more <10k (this is in Australia).
The difference between a brand new car and a 10 year old car is almost nil in terms of featureset nowadays (if anything, you get more because you can buy a higher end older model for less), every car has all the basics. Cars just got so good over the last 20-25 years that any vehicle in that age range is a perfectly reasonable choice.
Why there are no $3k-$4k cars? I am sure most people need cheaper cars, not electric cars, or AI cars, or cars with mobile app and telemetry. Those are toys for the rich.
"A Car" needs to be able to operate safely on highways at 60+ MPH. That means: horsepower, braking, crumple zones, airbags, crash testing, etc. By the time you add those up you've already exceeded that budget, and you only have a glorified rickshaw. People want doors, roll-down windows, etc, which all add cost... they're going to be better served with a used car in that price range.
The closest things that exist are Neighborhood Electric Vehicles. They're basically golf carts with seatbelts, allowed to operate on city streets up to 25 MPH.
It would be great if the US had something like Japan's Kei Cars. Those are $10k and up, fast and safe enough for local highway use (say 50MPH)... It works in Japan because urban traffic tends to be low speed. They are less practical in the US where freeways run through every city, but they'd still work for many people. They would require significant regulation changes.
Would the 3-wheel tadpole configuration vehicles (technically classified as motorcycles) fit the bill? I see them on the road frequently -- they have seats and car type controls, 2-seaters, some are fully enclosed too. I think this type is called an autocycle.
I wish there were some domestic manufacturers of Kei type cars[1] and, even more so, trucks[2] here in the US (or that it was cheaper and easier to import and license).
They are encouraged by regulation in Japan. Lower tax, registration fees, and insurance. Also the requirement in some areas to have off-street parking to register a car is waved.
A Ford Pinto in 1971 was $1,919 which is $15,000 in today's dollars.
A Yugo GV in 1984 was $3,990 which is $12,000 in today's dollars.
A Chevy Spark in 2013 was $12,995 which is over $17,000 in today's dollars.
Car companies can keep up with US regulations at about the $15,000 price point. Below that is losing money.
A Nissan Versa or Mitsubishi Mirage in 2024 cost about $16,000 which is right in line with the Ford, the Yugo, and the Chevy econo-rides of the past.
$3K-$4K wouldn't build you a crash regulation compliant unibody shell, much less a full car. If a major maker went balls out to build cheap and still be legal to sell in the US, they might be able to get the price down to $10K-$12K and still break even, but below that is a fantasy. Physics simply will not bend any further.
Take the subsidies away and the car is more. Like a Tesla getting $7.5K in EV rebates, Chinese EVs are also subsidized. That Chinese BYD Dolphin, $13,000 in China is $30,000 sold outside of China. Let's assume Chinese are getting a discount and everyone else is paying a penalty, that puts the real price somewhere around $22,000.
That $22,000 vehicle is comparable to a Hyundai Kona in the US for $25,000 (not eligible for US EV rebates so Hyundai cut the sticker price dramatically) or the Chevy Equinox for about the same after rebate.
As you can see, it's not really the difference the headlines make it out to be.
China is a difficult place to try to pry factual information out of, but I wouldn’t be keen to go that route.
I’ve seen some indication on social media of an elevated amount of severe failures of materials and/or poor welding in new vehicles from China. This leads me to suspect the usual corner cutting or outright fraud on material quality that makes China so risky to do business with.
It is difficult enough to hold western automakers to account for failures, I would not want to attempt to need legal recourse from Chinese companies.
- the usual Big Government stuff (industry-specific regulatory, bureaucratic, & legal moats)
- brutal economies of scale for highly complex large manufactured goods
- public-good-doesn't-count-for-shit capitalism
That last one is especially brutal. If you could make $20K by selling one $80k SUV, vs. $20K by selling 100 $3k cars (each with a $200 profit) - then it's damned obvious which way you'd want to go. From marketing, to staffing your showrooms, to sales paperwork, to customer complaints, to the long-term legal and forced-recall liabilities - trying to sell the 100 affordable little cars is a 100X worse choice for you.
They tried producing one of those - the Tata Nano, starting from like $2k but 3 or 4k with extras in India. It wasn't a big success selling 7500 a year against the 250k they were hoping for. I guess it was a bit rubbish even for the Indian market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tata_Nano
I think it's at least in part because you have to meet a whole lot of regulations to make a car street legal. You can start with a simple 3k vehicle, but by time you've made the changes needed to pass all the requirements it'll be over 10k.
It's worth noting that the majority of these regulations are at least nominally about safety.
A lot of the regulations are also about emissions, so conveniently that goes away with electric cars. But then your problem is that the battery is expensive. For now.
Emissions regulations add little to the cost of any one car or model. There's no secret sauce to catalytic converters or computerized fuel injectors that everyone's powertrains all copy or share.
The cost of distinct models is mostly in crash survivability and related regulated safety systems.
So why not just reuse the known design that works. No one said this proposed $3k car had to look different?
This whole argument is bunk. Just settle on a design (perhaps borne out of your higher end model) let it trickle down your product line (unchanged) other than stripping useless gadgets, etc.
Why do people assume those in the market for a $3k car care that it have a brand new body style?
Do you realize that at least half of the bike accidents don't involve cars? Getting rid of the cars won't get rid of the dangers of the two wheeled, unstable machines that frequently toss the riders when the brakes lock.
I'm not sure where you're getting this. This link doesn't have pages and it gathers information from a variety of sources.
The top of the report clearly says, "50% of crashes are a single bicycle accident (HOPE)" and "21% of crashes are a bicycle-bicycle crash (HOPE)". Is it possible that only 29% involve cars?
Seriously, I cannot recall any news report, of any bicycle accident, that didn't end in permanent injury or death (which sort of makes sense, but still ... )
Being in a news report is a fatal bias, though, since there won't be one for a bruised knee. It's not possible to derive any accurate knowledge from that.
Well slight disagree: I bought a sweet manual 6 speed 4x4 softop jeep 2 door from a Boston guy with just the right amount of after market add ons. Its "definitely there" and nothing to prove. I loved that ride. Manual everything. No subscriptions; simple engine. Little electronics. Cheap to fix. New tires at $350 each was the most expensive thing on it. Op is right for various reasons. Last New car purchase about 2005 for me. My wife totalled it and the prev car with 1 year of purchase ... so i partially quit new cause of that. Carmax as far as I can tell is too generous buying used cars, and they have too many good cars to bother with new. Electric is not my ballgame; other than not my pref not smart enough to say anymore more there.
This is it, and it's probably mostly about CarPlay/Android Auto. You can find 10-year-old cars with CarPlay these days. The cars are old, but guess what, once you plug in your phone, your interface is the latest iOS, same as any other car.
If you had to buy a clothes washer recently, top load is better than side load, agitator is better than no agitator, analog buttons or dial is a plus, et al. Old is better than new. The rude design choices have compounded. Nobody needs an app to know what cycle their washer is at. Anyone using a washer, listens for it. When your display goes out, all the functionality is gone. It's just mind boggling.
The 2024 Hyundai Tuscon with 10 year warranty (on top of the manufacturer's 2 year warranty) means this will probably be our last car. It has all the best features of 2019 and has very few rude problems - eg turning off the engine and opening the driver door locks the rear doors. That's not helpful.
IMHO it doesn't matter which kinds of bugs bubble up to daily use. I have no interest in purchasing something at full price when it's stuffed with buggy software that's harvesting my family's data for profit [0].
a bug in a routine to record our private, intimate conversations could put someone's life in danger, and for what? it's revolting enough to put in the work finding and maintaining 20 year old cars.
it'd be one thing if they were like smart TVs - pay $300 for one with a mile long privacy policy or pay $600 for a solid commercial display. but paying $20k+ and having no other option? abso fucking lutely not
I'm on team front-loader for sure. When I got my first one (about 30 years ago), I immediately noticed a significant reduction in dryer lint with no other changes. I attributed that to the washer doing less damage to the clothes and did later get a strong sense that my clothes were lasting correspondingly longer. (I couldn't detect any change in cleaning power.)
Completely agree that I don't need any WiFi connectivity on it.
I agree that older is better, especially in avoiding the data harvestng of newer cars (and everything else)
However, I would disagree that top load washers are better than front load. Front load uses less water and causes less wear of garmets. I bought the last several I've owned used, because odler is better (and cheaper)...
The bearings on a front-loader live a hard life and eventually fail, often as a result of the seal failing. I will give a typical top-loader a longer projected life without significant mechanical maintenance. (I’ve changed two sets of bearings on my own front loaders and one for my in-laws. It’s doable DIY but takes several hours, making it expensive to have a tech come do it.)
Currently, I have to set a timer on my phone to go check the washer and dryer because my laundry is in the basement and I'm probably on the 2nd floor or outside.
I would love it if these things would run on my network with simple, published APIs exposed to tell me status so that I could know that I could have automated alerting and know that they wouldn't fail in the future when their manufacturer drops support.
You can! Get an energy-monitoring smart plug[1]. Set it up on Home Assistant[2] or another smart-stuff system. Then create an Automation which sends an alert when it drops below 25 watts for 3 minutes.
It's all-local, and requires no integration with the washer. 220V dryers may be a little trickier, but still easy enough if you're comfortable with basic electrical stuff. You can put a sensor on an indicator light, or put a current clamp on one of the wires. Usually you only care when the washer is done though, so you can move your clothes over.
This is exactly what I did. It sends a text when it’s done. I forget some times even with the text, so I added repetitive alerts. That got annoying, so I added a door sensor to the washing machine to silence repetitive alerts if you open the door after a cycle is done. Total cost was negligible. A cheap $20 smart plug that I never use except for monitoring and $10 for the door sensor.
> I would love it if these things would run on my network with simple, published APIs
Then we could run botnets from those things, too. And ransomwares! I would love it if all the connected crap in my city went down at the same time, so that maybe people would think twice before buying a connected fridge.
I hate laundry. I still have no idea how to do it; I referred to detergent as laundry sauce a few years ago after forgetting the word. (Thank you, subconscious of mine.)
The new machines with screens are a nuisance. Apparently to you, somebody competent. But also to those of us for whom listening to one’s washing machine sounds like advice from a laundry Lorax.
Have you considered spending some time to understand how these machines work? I promise you the operational part in the manual that came with them is probably 10 pages long, and designed to instruct folks with an eighth grade reading level how to do laundry.
> Have you considered spending some time to understand how these machines work?
Yes, and I really don’t care to. I get some joy out of cooking, small mechanical jobs and even doing dishes. I do not from laundry.
My point isn’t that people should love or hate laundry. It’s that the modern technology seems to add no value to either the experts nor amateurs. I vastly prefer simple dials and buttons to the ISS docking procedures some appliances demand for socks.
I’ve seen one recently. It’s about 60-200 pages long book (multiple languages) worth of legalese. Same with most appliances and child car seats (which is especially cruel when you had a baby, no sleep for days and try to install one).
Laundry is not hard. Go watch a YouTube video. When it doubt, sort by color and size, wash on cold, hang dry. Heat can keep things white or dry things faster, but has higher potential to damage clothes.
All mass produced clothes of any value have a care tag that at least has symbols, if not outright written Instructions.
EDIT: Reading your bio makes me think of someone who has probably never had to do their own laundry.
I'm an expert at doing my laundry but boy it is hard.
Remembering which clothes I need to wash cold and hang-dry to prevent shrinkage vs. which can be washed warm and dried in the dryer.
Enough detergent that it cleans effectively but not too much that it leaves an irritating layer on your clothes -- obviously the detergent companies are trying to fool you into using too much so that you buy more. Learning to use the "+1 rinse cycle" button to fully get rid of the detergent residue.
Learning not to use fabric softener or dryer sheets. Learning that fragrance-free detergent is an option so your clothes don't smell like a horrid cheap air freshener. Learning how to use bleach and which kind (there are many formulations!) and in which part of the cycle and how much to keep your whites, well, actually white. But not so much it unnecessarily damages them.
Or using a laundry loop to ensure you identify all your white cotton t-shirts that you want to wash and bleach together with your white socks washcloths etc., but then separate so you hang-dry the tees so they don't shrink, without accidentally leaving any in the dryer with your socks etc. and ruining them.
Learning that you should unbutton your shirts so the buttons don't get pulled off, but zip up all zippers so the teeth don't produce wear and tear catching on other garments. Learning to turn certain pants and other items inside out when washing and drying to lengthen their life, learning to throw in a couple of tennis balls when drying something bulky, and so forth. Or learning to check my dryer every 15 minutes in case my duvet cover has decided to twist itself into a kind of rope, where it turns into this weird boa constrictor that's eaten 3 of my pillowcases that will never every dry until I untwist it and remove them.
It's seriously actually kind of shockingly complicated.
Hacker news, creme de la creme of technologists, don't know how to do laundry. What a joke. It must be some kind of class signal: I don't have to know how to do laundry.
I don’t, not anymore. But even when I could jot afford to outsource the task, I hated it and literally changed my closet to optimise my time at the task.
I’d venture that most people have a chore they hate, and that they trade off elsewhere to minimise. (Common one being cooking.)
You can ignore everything and just throw things in a cold wash with a little bit of detergent and then hang them out to dry. Things will probably be fine.
Separating whites (if your clothes are particularly prone to running colour) is a mistake you only make once.
While I greatly appreciate the coinage "laundry sauce" I think the great majority of people know how to do this stuff and it's not hard to find out how.
I think it has to do with learning styles and mental database structures.
I design complex medical implants, can build a car from scratch, and even understand some of the polymer chemistry of fabrics, but still struggle with laundry despite doing it for 20 years.
I have settled into the heuristic of warm wash & repeat until clean + dryers destroy anything but socks.
> The new machines with screens are terrible. Apparently to you. But also to those of us who have no idea what you’re talking about with this Lorax for the laundry talk.
I think it's just a simple statement that, for example, an app that proudly offers to tell you when your drying is done is really offering no service, since you can just hear from the fact that the dryer's not running that it's done—not that we're performing some delicate sound-based diagnosis.
(That's, of course, presumably referring to people with in-unit dryers; I can imagine this being a useful service if one were using shared units, say in a common room in an apartment complex, or in a laundromat. But that's assuming that the app is intended actually to do its advertised job rather than to provide a vector for manufacturers to shoehorn in some other unwanted behavior, which is an assumption decidedly in need of supporting evidence.)
What the hell are you talking about about? It's not complicated you dork, you put in clothes, select a wash size, pick the right temp (hot for whites, med for lights, cold for darks/special care) put in soap (and oxyclean if you're feeling fancy) and push the button. It's takes like 45 minutes and you throw the shit into the dryer.
The hardest part is folding the goddamn fitted sheets and matching up the socks at the end. If this is too complicated for you I recommend taking a technology fast for a week. Freaking bugmen.
If I want a boiled egg, chances are I want it soft-boiled (runny yolk but cooked white) which is the custom here in the UK. (As children we are given a softboiled egg in an egg-cup along with rectangles of toast called "soldiers" to dip in the yolk. I guess it's an Edwardian thing, redolent of Nannies and Nurseries.)
In all my 50 years I still cannot reliably produce a softboiled egg, regardless of the method. Do I bring the water to the boil with the eggs already in the pan, then count from when it reaches the boil? How do I judge a "rolling boil"? Or do I wait for the water to boil then put the eggs in, risking cracking? How do I adjust the timing if I want to boil multiple eggs?
I can hardboil them but sometimes overcook them and get that sulphurous green yolk edge, or I forget to set an alarm and underboil them leading to an unpleasant surprise later of a partially-cooked egg white spilling out of my inedible egg.
For fried eggs in my stainless steel pan (I don't have any non-stick pans) unless I pre-heat for ~20mins, the egg sticks and I often end up having to chisel it out with the spatula and breaking the yolk which depending on my morning mood can be a real downer. Added to which the underside is usually cooked way before the top, and the egg white in the thickest part is still clear and snotty, so I will try to flip the egg, doubling my chances of breaking the yolk and killing my morning.
Scrambled eggs are nice but easy to overcook to a dry pebbly consistency, and unfailingly create a quarter-inch layer of crusted egg in the pan which goes to soak in the sink and return later in the day as a jellyish monstrosity to cling to my hand or be clawed dripping out of the plughole catcher.
I love a filled omelette, but again it's a crapshoot - too hot a pan and the egg goes hard and rubbery on the outside, too cold and the folding is difficult, especially with solid items in the filling.
My point is, boiling eggs is undeserving of its status as a byword for simplicity. It's getting to the stage (for me) where it's an object lesson in how much I can fuck up a seemingly simple thing.
> Do I bring the water to the boil with the eggs already in the pan, then count from when it reaches the boil?
Safest, most fool-proof method: bring the water to a boil, kill the heat, gently lower the eggs into the water and cover. Remove at your preferred time and transfer to an ice bath.
Water boils at a consistently precise temperature (at a given altitude). If you're cooking indoors, you probably also have a somewhat-stable air temperature around the pot. This means the heat curve from ~100°C is remarkably stable across boilings. Given an egg sets between 63°C (whites thicken) and 73°C (yolk cooks), you will always--eventually--wind up with a hard-boiled egg. (You're also cooking in still water, which is obviously less violent.)
There are various guides online for this, but it's an easy-enough expermient to pull one out every minute from ~3 minutes to 15. (Presumably over several days. But not a bad brunch set-up. And you already have an ice bath for the wine!)
> For fried eggs in my stainless steel pan
Steel-clad pans aren't all steel, they're aluminium clad in steel. That means you can't get the steel safely to the ripping-hot temperatures that keep the albumen from binding to the iron.
For the frying, we never have any grief on our cast iron. I usually give it a little spray of oil, but you can successfully fry an egg even if you don't. We have a couple stainless calphalons that are pretty effective at filling space inside the cupboard and that's about it.
Really? I just bring water to a boil, put eggs in and set a six minute timer. Move them to cold water and peel. Perfect soft-boiled eggs every single time.
I’m more than happy to spend an afternoon figuring out the times and temperatures that get me various stages of runny and jammy at my altitude, on my range, in a way I couldn’t be bothered to for the benefit of having clothes again.
I have a very intelligent friend who has the same attitude towards personal finances and refuses any help. It is very sad but there's apparently nothing I can do about it.
> friend who has the same attitude towards personal finances and refuses any help
Funny, me too. Despite working in finance. (It’s quite common.) I outsource that task, too, in part because I don’t want to be day trading, in part because index funds are near bulletproof nowadays and in part to hide the money from myself.
Would note that there is a difference between hating a task and not doing it, and hating a task and managing it.
I bought an EV, so I'm part of the problem. I hate that it's basically a rack of servers on wheels that I don't have root on, and which track my every move.
The neat classic car conversion kits embody what it could be like, an EV drive train without the fully integrated smart infotainment nightmare world that feels like it might randomly try to force feed you peanuts with an articulated arm at any moment while you try to recall where in the touch screen menu hierarchy the AC controls are located - I digress. Unfortunately they are also prohibitively expensive to be of any practical use to ordinary people.
I think there are cheaper EVs that don't have so much crap in them, but they unfortunately also tend to have terrible batteries. I suppose that is the reason they are strongly correlated, only the expensive EVs have decent batteries and just like most new expensive ICE cars they tend to be chocked full of the worst and most and complex technology.
I love my '98 Jeep Grand Cherokee for everything but the gas mileage. I especially love that everything is under direct button and dial control, and yet somehow its interior doesn't look like that of a 747.
If a 26-year-old car can do it, so can modern ones.
My '85 VW Vanagon/Transporter Westfalia with 80 hp has direct port fuel injection and gets ~25 mpg. I rarely drive it because EVs are so much damn cheaper and less maintenance.
About two years ago,, the CEO of Stellantis was crowing that they were going to crank up their margins to Apple levels with after-sale feature bills. Not hearing that much any more. The "more crap per car" approach backfired. For a while, rather blah SUVs were reaching for US$100,000. That didn't last.
Outside the US, which now has a 100% tariff on cars imported from China, electric cars from China are taking over. Nio and BYD have good cars now. Without subscription-based heated car seats.
To replace a touchscreen, you need knobs, sliders, and switches. They don't need to directly connect to things; they can just talk CANbus like everything else in a car. You just need low-cost, rugged, standard modules for knobs, lights, sliders, and switches. Make them all the same depth and mount them staked into a PC board. Provide the board with a stiffening rail so the thing feels solid if someone pushes hard. The board has one CANbus output that connects to the dashboard bus. No hand-wiring. Only one thing to install during vehicle assembly.
Such controls are used in tractors, heavy trucks, and heavy machinery.[1] They just need to be engineered as a volume product. Probably in Shenzhen.
Nah, it's that new cars drop 50% of their value on the first three years. People are fed up setting fire to their cash. The pressures of living costs don't permit it for many.
3-5yo cars are the sweet spot. The depreciation curve starts to flatten. A good clean and it's as good as new.
While I'm also in the anti-touchscreen crowd (and depressed to hear that cost reduction is the core reason they've taken over), I think another reason might be that we've been promised for years that cars (EVs in particular) are on the cusp of a technological revolution.
Not just in terms of self-driving features, but also single-charge range and price. If you know next year's car is going to be significantly better - and at worst the same price - why would you buy a car this year?
The article claims people are avoiding CVTs, is this true? I found some stuff on reddit, mostly about older nissans being troublesome and some people not liking how it changes the feel of acceleration, but a lot of people say they are fine.
I bought a 9 year old honda recently with a CVT and it seems fine to me, I like how it accelerates but I'm not a pedal stomper. I also like that it has a CD player (can still use the CDs transferred from my previous 27 year old car).
Minimalist touchscreen helps too, though its too old to show maps from my phone.
I can somewhat justify the cost of mid and full size SUVs currently, but still hate that you're looking to spend about 40-60k, more if luxury. The "popularity" of the segment has pushed makers to actually put some effort in handling, fuel efficiency, and reliability. The current offerings of this segment is leaps better than majority of the offerings of mid 2010s and older.
However, each maker is just slightly missing the mark here and there, and you are pretty much just cross shopping compromises. Unibody or body on frame? Lose physical buttons? Get touchscreen distractions spanned across your entire dash? Half baked infotainment system? Laughable trunk space with the third row up? No fold flat third row? Off-road/overland trim, but barely capable and/or not even a good enough platform to warrant aftermarket support?
At the current prices new or used, how long these cars last when taken care of, and being a "bang for buck"/"buy once cry once" kind of person. Nothing has really been compelling enough for me to purchase a 3 row for my spouse. (Nuclear family with kids really close in age that regularly road trip)
When it comes to crossovers, compact, and sedans. (Non sport/performance trims) The prices are alright, just find a solid example of something made within the past decade within your budget, take care of it, it takes care of you.
The sports car or performance trim segment is where I'm also torn. On one hand, everything is so much faster, capable, and more reliable (debatable) as time goes on. The other, is that the essence of what made older cars of the same segment great is slowly getting neutered out of the overall driving and owning experience.
Regarding the sports or performance trim, I feel that it's a price anchoring tactic for margin.
They painfully neuter the bottom trim to be able to advertise "starting at" with the most top end model.
Then they lock all the desirable features behind the higher trims. All of a sudden, the 29.5k base price is a sham and you have the option between the fully loaded 45k car or the more "reasonable" 39.5k car. But the reality is that the buyer just paid an extra 10k for heated leather seats, keyless entry, slightly upgraded speakers, some bigger wheels and a nicer looking front and rear bumper.
They understand that there's multiple psychological games to play. Status, reliability, etc... Advertise with the low price, then upsell, upsell, upsell, and use the finance arm to focus on monthly payments.
People are definitely tired of these tactics for sure.
If buyers want features, this implies a demand in the market.
If capitalism is {buyer; market; seller} then demand in the market should draw product from sellers.
The market is regulated, so wildly unsafe demands should go unmet.
But if the market is over-regulated, then an electoral feedback loop ought to trim excessive regulation so that the market can meet demand.
Which brings us to the question: why aren't people running for office on a platform of taking pliers and a blowtorch to the Orwellian regulatory thicket?
Trump runs exactly on that platform. (I was super surprised actually. )
Dave Chapelle had a really compelling point about why people love Trump. (I don't support him, but describing the observation)
At the debates, Trump vs Clinton:
T: "The govt is corrupt"
C: "Prove it."
T: "I use all those tricks myself."
C: "Well you don't pay taxes."
T: "Then change the rules so I pay. But I know you won't because all your political donors also use those same corrupt tricks."
C: ...
Of course Trump did nothing to actually change the regulations in a meaningful way, but his supporters do feel that he represents their interests far more than the established, lifetime, incumbent congressfolk.
