General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Yesterday the last car rolled down the line at Lordstown GM in Lordstown Ohio, I wept as I [View all]PoindexterOglethorpe
(26,178 posts)that it's hard to imagine used cars becoming scarce.
I remember a similar panic back in the 1970s, during the first oil crisis. All of a sudden people started hanging on to their cars for a whole lot longer than they used to, and there were fears that used cars would disappear. Didn't happen.
What did happen was that American automobile manufacturers finally woke up and realized they needed to build cars that were more reliable, more like the European and Japanese cars that people were buying.
And here's something that surprised me: according to a quick online search the average car in this country is just over 11 years old. Which is a huge change from the 1950s and 60s when people who could afford it bought a new car every two years. And it seemed that very few people had a car that was more than five years old. People also drove far less then than they do now. The reliability of cars has increased enormously, which is a very good thing.
And some cars lose very little value in the first few years. Heck, when I went out to buy a car last year I fully intended to get a brand new Fit in no small part because of that. Alas, new Fits had disappeared because there was a flood in the factory in Mexico, suspending production for several months. Then I learned that the 2017 model was the last one with a CD player, which I absolutely wanted, and one such had come off lease at the dealership. I didn't save very much money over a new one, but I got the features I wanted. Plus I'm in awe of how far the technology had come in a 13 years. My previous car was a 2004 Civic.
People survive the disappearance of specific cars or even entire car companies. I knew people that owned Saturns and were unwilling to consider any other car. The one time I test drove one I was shocked by how tinny and cheap it seemed. That company went out of business a decade ago, although I still see the cars on the road. Customer loyalty can be powerful.