Comment by kube-system
15 hours ago
The real cause of people's frustration with the US car market isn't CAFE, but the fact that the car market in the US is bifurcated by class and heavily financially engineered. The reason you can't get a cheap car in the US is entirely because US manufacturers are dictating what people can buy -- why give the middle class affordable options when you can make more money by squeezing them for cash for 84 months? What are they going to do, ride the non-existent bus?
Well also as part of the 08 recovery we scrapped a lot of the used car market to create demand for new vehicles.
The average car that CARS took in was a 1996 model year with 138,000 miles in 2009. Even if we never did that program they'd be long gone by now.
The current crazy pricing is mostly due to supply that was cut off during covid -- those would all be prime used cars today -- but many were never made, so used car pricing is crazy -- and manufacturers have no incentive to create cheap new cars if buyers don't have other options.
There’s cars upwards of 20 years still on the road …
But also the waves overlap so we’d still have about 700k cars in additional supply.
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That happened so long ago that an entire new wave of used cars exist by now.