Which costs more–buying a new vehicle or fixing up the one you’ve got?
Everyone has heard about the unprecedented skyrocketing prices of used vehicles, especially trucks, over the past couple of years. The media says this is happening because of shortages of new vehicles.
The truth is that the value of used vehicles, especially used trucks, waxes because interest in new ones wanes. We’ve already passed a kind of event horizon as regards the desirability of new vehicles vs. their undesirability.
For decades, since the very beginning of the Age of the Car, it was the reverse. New vehicles generally were better, not just newer.
They came with more desirable features; they tended to be better-built and more reliable with each successive model year. You got more for your money, which was an incentive to part with your money.
What do you get today?
Undesirable features such as “advanced driver assistance technology,” which both insults your intelligence and aggravates your senses, every time you try to drive the car and have to fight the car’s attempts to countermand your driving. These “technologies” are all-but-impossible to avoid in new vehicles, having been virtue-signaled into the standard equipment package by car companies that are less interested in selling cars than selling “technology.”
How about ASS? The obnoxious “technology” that stops the engine every time the car stops? Then starts it up again, rinse and repeat–over and over and over, again? Yes, you can turn it off. The point is, why should you have to turn it off if you don’t want it,
But it goes deeper than these minor electronic annoyances. The cloying parenting of adults by “technology” is not something we asked for but forced us to pay for it anyway.
Many of us are also aware that most vehicles made over the past ten or so years are technological time-bombs, embalmed with electronica that isn’t repairable when it fails and which will cost a fortune to replace when it does. They don’t want 48 volts, mild hybrids, multiple turbos, and ten-speed transmissions behind 2.0-liter engines in two-ton vehicles.
They want repairable (if possible via owner) vehicles that can be kept in good order for decades. They want non-turbocharged engines and manual transmissions. Perhaps even roll-up windows. Ideally no airbags, but anything less than the six or more that almost every new car is force-fitted with will do.
Most of all, they want it affordable and not go into massive debt just to go from A to B.
People are smart enough to understand that it is not just the cost of a new car that is high, it is also the cost of the taxes and insurance applied to them. All of which, together, serve to impoverish and enslave them–leaving aside the being parented by the inevitably throw-away new car.
That is why the value of older vehicles waxes.
Even more so when you run some numbers and realize how much less it costs to return an older, pre-electronic vehicle to operationally as-new condition. Perhaps even cosmetically new, too. The end result is an older vehicle free of all the undesirable features of new vehicles that simply works and even looks like new.
This is one of the reasons, people who already own an older vehicle that’s readily fixable are not selling them. This, in turn, increases the cost of buying such a vehicle when one becomes available.
I could probably sell my ’02 Nissan Frontier pickup with about 140,000 miles on for $7K, which is about what I paid for it, used, about twelve years ago. But it’d be stupid of me to sell it for even twice that, because there’s nothing new that approximates its value and not just to me, either.
Give it another couple of years and let’s see how much a truck without a ten-speed automatic, a turbocharged 2.0-liter engine, “advanced driver assistance technology” and all the rest is worth.
In the meanwhile, I could spend $7k on a new/rebuilt engine and clutch job; go through the simple (mechanical) suspension and fix/replace anything that needs it and end up with an operationally as-new truck that will probably last longer than any new truck will and which will never parent me in the meanwhile.
No ASS. Not even a seatbelt buzzer. I shift for myself, which is something you’re not allowed to do in any new truck. There are no “updates” changing the way my truck runs or doesn’t, if they decide to turn it off (which they can’t, with an old truck that isn’t connected). No EULA came with it; just an owner’s manual.
By the way, I am the owner because no one else controls my truck.
This is why my truck is worth its weight in gold, almost to me as well as people who wish they had one like it, too.
Eric Peters lives in Virginia and enjoys driving cars and motorcycles. In the past, Eric worked as a car journalist for many prominent mainstream media outlets. Currently, he focuses his time writing auto history books, reviewing cars, and blogging about cars+ for his website EricPetersAutos.com.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
