Comment by yurishimo
Plus people who buy cars are eating all the depreciation. I’ll glad buy your 2024 Corolla in 2032.
Plus people who buy cars are eating all the depreciation. I’ll glad buy your 2024 Corolla in 2032.
I haven't seen any evidence that the "reliable" car brands are trying to change that dynamic moving forward. I think we are seeing a change in consumer behavior that leads to increased demand for new cars, but that is not connected to the reliability of the platform of the long term maintenance requirements.
If electric cars are actually simpler like all of these experts keep telling us, then in the next 3-5 years, we'll know which models are living up to expectations and which ones are not aging as gracefully.
The other thing to consider is the "old" batteries. If I can buy a used Nissan Leaf and harvest the batteries for a home-storage project after the frame kicks the can due to rust or some other problem, then I'm essentially able to keep those batteries as a form of equity on the vehicle. We also will see new companies popping up to address these home-battery conversion projects with plug and play harnesses to drop in your car batteries after the vehicle is no longer worthy of use on the road.
Sure, batteries will also continue to come down in price across the board, so that calculation also needs to be considered, but we're in this interesting middle zone where a lot of used EV value is being left on the table because the business market hasn't quite kept up with the demand for the next step in the lifecycle of modern EVs.
You say this like the average age and reliability of cars hasn't been skyrocketing for years.
Toyota offers a 10-year warranty on new cars, which would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.
You can't update the infotainment, but the engine controls have remained modular because it's simply too hard to convince people to buy truly unrepairable cars. Tesla did it, and once people realized that gently tapping a Model 3 was likely to total it resale values plummeted.
~20yr ago the Koreans were offering 10/100k as a "we stand behind our product" signal.
My mother drives a 12 year old car. If you don't use it much and have a parking garage cars are pretty much indestructible.
Are you sure about that? The sustainable operation of modern cars is in doubt, from very specialized parts and fully integrated modules, to critical software that will not be updated, to dealer keying required for most every substitute part, the era of anyone being able to run cars for 200,000 miles long after the warranty is over will soon be in the history books.