and the other reason is that "cars are twice as expensive", which ignores the context completely, otherwise it would specify whether the cars are twice as expensive on paper, or twice as expensive in reality.
> Usefulness is purely the decision of the buyer. You may think buying an expensive car to impress others is stupid, but so? All car sales don’t have to fit within your definition of usefulness.
Exactly. So saying that a more expensive car is always more useful is crazy. Maybe the more expensive car is too big for the roads where I live, or has worse fuel economy, or has less interior space.... Price and usefulness are not completely unrelated, but assuming they're equivalent is absurd.
>It's always cheaper to build two of the same thing than two different things.
Not if the second variant is cheap enough and/or will be sold in enough volume to recoup the fixed costs (engineering, tooling, etc) and still turn a profit.
If that weren't the case you'd only be able to get cars in black.
Edit: Is my math wrong or is reality inconvenient today?
I was under the impression that they have less service costs due to fewer moving parts. Or maybe it comes out all the same since there's less to service, but when something does need servicing it's more expensive than usual.
> But, on the other hand, let's say I decide to forgo, say, a $60k car and instead get a still very nice $45k car.
Does anyone else have difficulty understanding why anyone would pay this much for a car? $45k is an order of magnitude more than I've ever paid for a car. Granted, I don't even like cars or driving, but the cars I've owned have been perfectly functional and any mechanical problems they've had still didn't add up to more than $10k.
- 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.
>My last car had 150,000 miles on it, and needed around $3000 of engine work (timing chain, head gasket). The car was only worth around $4000, so I traded it in on a new car.
I don't understand this logic. You had to put up way more money to buy a new car. Unless you really want a new car, there is no cost justification for buying something brand new that will lose more than the value of your old car in less than a year.
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