Lamenting the used car market

This is just about me lamenting about the state of the used car market. Prices spiked during the pandemic … they’re almost 50% over what they were in December 2019.

One nice thing about buying used is that it’s less of a commitment than buying a new car. You get to try out what you like, and just sell it later if you don’t like it. It’s a different tradeoff. Some folks insist that either way is the “best way” but it’s really just about tradeoffs between the two. With a new car, the risk is that depreciation will take a lot off the value of the car, and you don’t like it anymore. With a used car, if you’re not mechanically inclined you could be buying a lemon, or face more maintainance costs down the road.

In my case, back in 2018 I did that to learn how to drive a manual car. I bought a beater civic off craigslist and used that to learn how to drive a manual car without having to worry too much about messing it up.

I eventually “upgraded” to a 2004 mazda3 (again bought off craigslist), with less than 80k miles on it.

It sucks that it’s much harder to do that today; cars with 100k+ miles are selling for more than 8k. It looks like the used car market seems to be correcting a bit recently, but prices are still well over what they were pre-pandemic.

Other notes

Auto insurance coverage

Because of the inflated car prices, it didn’t really make sense to only carry liability auto insurance anymore! My reasoning pre-pandemic was that used cars are cheap enough and easy enough to replace that carrying liability-only insurance made sense. Now, however it’s way harder to get a new car so it doesn’t make any sense for me anymore.

The reality of cars in the US

The truth is that for many places in the US, a car is a necessary part of life. The cities are just built that way, and I don’t think there’s a migration path to change that anytime soon. So, for folks who don’t live in cities with great public transportation this is a huge quality of life hit.