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> Intuitively I would have thought cars are cheaper too - but a moment of research indicated they're actually more expensive.

This surprised me so I looked into it -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity#Statistics

- in 1960 a car's lifetime was about 100k miles, while today it's about 200k.

https://www.thepeoplehistory.com/60scars.html

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a38748092/new-car-average-...

- in 1960 the average new car cost $2,752 ($26,100 in 2022 dollars) - in 2022 the average new car costs $47,000

So in 1960 you'd pay about 26100/100000 = $0.26 / mile, whereas in 2022 you'd pay about $0.24 / mile. There'd also be qualitative differences in the experience like performance, comfort, safety, entertainment, etc.

On the whole it's not a lot cheaper (somewhere around 8%), but it turns out our intuitions were correct.



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