Car affordability in 2022 and beyond

The gig economy almost was working for employees in 2020, now it’s in the process of failing and going away in many sectors of the country. The cost to do the gig exceeds the pay recieved and tips have gone near zero. Everybody and their brother still needs to do it because many still aren’t really employed despite the 2020 commentary, but eventually they will give up. I’ve known about a dozen folks who were in a gig 2020 that have given up due to sub minimum wage earnings most days.

Semi drivers being contractors may as well be thrown in here and that industry will eventually run out of suckers taking a job that costs more than it pays, you would think 20 years of a systemic failure would get industry to understand they have to pay for equipment, maintenance and repairs but apparently only government intervention at this point will affect that industry.

While those segments run out of steam the forced virtualization of white collar is very likely to lead to a collapse of the upper and upper middle in that workforce because you are now competing with buck a day foreign personnel. There was mention a while back that those who consider themselves wealthy (but aren’t) will likely be in a lot of pain 2023+ and we are seeing the start of that process as those jobs are eliminated by technology. The tech industry is most likely to get cleared out first.

So where 2020 cut the legs off the lower end because of bad housing policy and bailouts , 2023 will likely cut the head off the top end leaving only in person jobs and blue collar.

Refineries are running 95% utilization despite only being reliable around 65% utilization, oil companies have no plans on repairing the lost refineries and demand is only expected to drop 2-5% a year. BEV production is also limited to about 5% of us cars. I would expect dry gas stations a couple times a year due to corporate greed with no solution.

Many physical retailers are planning on just stopping and aren’t even looking for buyers anymore
so that work will become “unavailable “, many restaurant and service places are talking about going out of business en masse due to the high debts they have garnered

What will replace all these segments being eliminated, I have no idea, maybe they will turn over giving new blood a go at business ownership?

Hopefully a 3rd round of corporate landlord bailouts and bank bailouts is off the table.
Let things deflate and get shuffled

Many at home workers will be in for a rude awakening as their jobs are eliminated en mass by technology. Overwhelming what will be left will be manual labor.

May give a chance for the lower end to re enter the housing market

 

Couldn't disagree more. I learned to drive on a 1964 VW bug.

Very much am a supporter of the new safety suites and wouldn't consider a car without them.

Many individuals make this an either/or conversation and it is not.

I control the car, look over my shoulder, look in the side and rear-view mirrors also. The new safety technology is a supplement to my driving to help with things/situations I may have missed. Invaluable to an experienced or new driver smart enough to let it assist them.

If the safety suites you are using don't work for you, look for another manufacturer. In our vehicle a disillusioned driver can turn each of them off.

There is a good reason insurance companies give vehicles with these new features substantial reductions in rates.

Most individuals want every edge than can get these days with the type of drivers currently gracing our roads.

If you don't want the extra help and protection, they offer- turn them off - if you can't get a car where you can.

The above is my opinion - I have neither the qualifications or intelligence to discount the many wonderful safety features in todays autos that in some cases will actually stop the vehicle before it lets the vehicle slam into another vehicle or person. I might even support adding a breathalyzer function that would not allow an intoxicated driver to start the vehicle.

Breathalyzers in cars aren't science fiction
New Law Requires Breathalyzers in Cars of Convicted Drunk Drivers in California - HG.org

Penn Study: In-Car Breathalyzers for DUI Offenders Curb Drunk-Driving Deaths by 15 Percent | Penn Today (upenn.edu)

Infrastructure Bill Requires Not-Yet-Invented Breathalyzer in All New Cars (reason.com)

 

What's the word I am trying to think of.......OH....redundant.

As John321 said....I want my car to have redundant safety features.

Am I able to drive without safety suites? Sure. I may drive my whole life and never need them. But I want them. I want many of them -- except TPMS -- I don't want them -- although come to think of it....hmmm.
kris

 

So what do you advocate those refinery owners/shareholders do? You expect them to make major investments with little prospect of recovering costs?

 

I sold a perfectly good car with perhaps 70k miles on it and needing nothing to get what I call the electronic nannies. A freind just yesterday was commenting how he wouldn't do without them now that he has experienced them. I suppose they are redundant 98% of the time but the distracted 2% ....

 

• alcohol fuels
• liquified petroleum gasses
• anhydrous ammonia

Bob Wilson

 

They always have in the past, even in times of lower profits. It’s not like anyone pays me to reroof my house every time it fails, everyone and everything should have to take care of their assets.

A new refinery costs $5-$10b in the US , (less overseas and less to repair an existing facility) annual profits are projected to be in the $100b-$200b area for the next 3 and we have a deficit of 2-3 refineries that will be needed for the next 20 years considering several of the refineries we have amped up are past EOL 10 years ago.

Seems like a no brainer and something.gov shouldn’t need to motivate

Likely falls under national security since we will have hard shortages with dry stations each time a refinery goes down for maintenance or repairs.

How do you suppose the US will handle rationing when we have 1/3-1/2 the fuel we need?
And it’s not like this is new, we have been deficient in refining capacity for 20 years even through growing demand, just now it’s becoming critical.

People could starve and die if a plant shuts down before fertilizer is made for the year, the 3rd world is already facing a crisis due to lack of fertilizers which are tied at the hip with refining capacity

 

Toyota Unveils Multifamily Tenement Sedan For People Living Out Of Their Cars

Toyota Unveils Multifamily Tenement Sedan For People Living Out Of Their Cars

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Kinda sad that we're at the stage where we poke fun at the homeless

 

It’s funny looking back, I had some of the stuff right and others despite how fast everything is moving remain to be seen.

We are now getting the commentary that tech, bank and real estate layoffs are no big deal because they are in demand personnel.

What’s left out is that like 2008, those that demand them usually pay less meaning we have had folks moving down the totem pole as that is where the demand is.
That will still inevitably affect high end sales of homes and other goodies. (Which we are already seeing)

This whole 2020 experience is a good example of why relying on only the upper 5% for economic participation like home ownership is bad since bad luck can affect only a specific wealth group.

We will see if it turns out fine for the upper middle anyway as we continue to unwind the big 2020 spend.

 

I didn't notice this thread at the time. I think I was travelling or something.

I think what's stopping BYD is not so much regulation designed to protect the US car industry from foreign competition as legislation that's specifically anti-China. Of course, since you wrote this post, there's been the Inflation Reduction Act, which has made matters far worse.

Chinese manufacturers - of both cars and batteries - are now just pulling out of plans to manufacture in or even sell to the US. BYD is shutting down its electric bus factory in California. NIO and BYD are both abandoning plans for US car factories. CATL has decided not to invest in a gigafactory in the US and is instead licensing its tech to Ford and providing contracted management to what will be a Ford-owned facility (although frankly I can't even see that model succeeding: the US government will shut that deal down one way or another). Sovereign risk in investing in the US or even in relying on too big a proportion of sales going to the US is so high for Chinese companies, particularly in the EV sector, that it would be stupid for them to do anything there. They're in the fortunate position that demand for their products is so high in the rest of the world that they can't actually meet demand, so cutting out the US isn't causing them any pain for now, but of course it does limit future growth for them, and it restricts American consumers' access to the best-value products.

So I think the rest of the world will see the disruption you mention, but I can't see it happening in the US.

 

As long as China's anti-democracy and anti-human rights government is maintained it will all be run by small minded men more interested in saving face and pleasuring their egos than being great leaders in serving their people's freedom. If you're a company in China, not only do you risk running into a situation where the government might take you out at any moment, but you could also end up like Huawei where the western world black lists you and prevents you from operating in the free world. Other than the prison camps where China builds products for western countries, there's very little opportunity for that country to sustain their economy in the long run given the level of corruption its leaders have put around its neck.

 

Wonder what would happen, if someone introduced a stripper car to North American market, with manual roll-up windows, non-chipped key ignition, manual AC controls, sealed-beam headlights ($20 variety, adjusted for inflation), AM/FM/CD econobox radio, old-school cruise, and full-sized spare. Say something like Matrix body style. Who knows.

 

You can't get a stripped down car in the US unless it's an older car... The required safety features for a new car make a cheap stripped down car impossible. And never forget: The Yugo: The Rise and Fall of the Worst Car in History | PopMatters

However if you have some connections in overseas shipping and you don't plan to drive on public roads you can buy some hilarious low-priced electric vehicles on alibaba... The leading EV news website has a weekly series where they research these and sometimes they buy them and test them: https://electrek.co/guides/alibaba/

 

In Europe, this is what Dacia does. Dacia is the Romanian subsidiary of Renault.

The Dacia Sandero is the cheapest car you can buy in Britain. It has most of the things you mention. In Britain, it costs £12,995. The Kia Picanto and MG3 come next, at around £500 more.

They sell pretty well. I do not understand why: I don't know why you wouldn't just buy a used car instead.

I had the next size up of Dacia, a Dacia Logan MCV, as a hire car in Germany in 2019. It was awful. It was a 2019 car based on the platform of a 2000 Renault Clio, but stretched into a medium-sized station wagon, but still with a normally-aspirated 1.2 litre engine. On German autobahns it was dangerously slow. It was uncomfortable and miserable, and it felt like it was punishing you for being poor. It was the Ibis Budget Hotel of cars.

 

Poor build quality does not have to be the norm on a stripper car, but I guess in practice it tends to be.

 

Mmm.

You might want to educate yourself on this. You know, find out what's really going on, talk to Chinese people, stuff like that.

But I bet you won't.

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I won't say much here because it's not the politics thread.

But what is worth noting is that what I said above was about what was happening and how it might affect the likelihood of disruption in the US auto market and reductions in price, which is what the thread is about, and I compared this with how things are changing in all of the rest of the world. You talked about your dislike of China.

One of us talked about something relevant to this thread. One of us chose not to do that.

 

The build quality was OK. It was just a miserable place to be. Like, wilfully depressing. Noisy, and uncomfortable, and ugly - things it wouldn't have cost anything to address. And the marginally-dearer cars, especially the Picanto, are way more cheerful.