To me this looks like how people who never use a bike imagine a good bike. I am ok with the brakes but the rest just makes the bike more complex and expensive with possible planned obsolescence. I don't want to deal with firmware updates for my bike.
It seems US manufacturers only cater to the luxury segment. How about doing something simple, reliable and cheap? With the tariffs soon they will kill off cheap foreign options and we will only have upscale things to buy. It used to be that the US was good at producing for the mass market but it seems that's over.
This thing seems totally overengineered by people who never use bikes
DOGE should not have even been a thing. The fact that DOGE is a friggin' meme, brought to you by a ridiculously wealthy man child swindler who pushes the meme coin with the same name, was enough of a tell. Unfortunately, most of society is uninformed/uneducated, or simply enamored with the wealthy.
It's not the entirety of congress's fault. We know who's to blame here.
"the customer only really cares about the monthly payment,"
I noticed this when I bought my Subaru. There was a young couple next to me that worked hard with the sales guy to get an acceptable monthly payment for their desired car. No thought about actual price or duration of the loan. I wanted to scream at them that they were making a big mistake.
Car salesmen also want to get you to focus on monthly payment instead of price.
It’s easy to manipulate the payment by adjusting the loan term without actually taking anything off the price. And then the finance manager can further manipulate the payment by upselling you additional products and saying it’s only an additional $7 per month instead of saying nitrogen in your tires will cost $336.
Agreed. I usually have to remind the salesperson to stop talking to me in monthly payment terms. I always tell them to talk to me about final price including all interest.
It's a bit of an uphill battle, where you have to tell them over and over. They're just so used to trying to sell the monthly payment. It's really no wonder that people that don't understand interest (many if not most) will fall for this. And if you actually can't really afford the car, it's also understandable why many if not most people will "gladly" fall for it. The alternative is not having the car of their dreams.
That said, financing in general isn't bad. I've financed most of my cars. I wouldn't have had the sort of "emergency fund" to just outright buy the car and financing allowed me to get the car when I needed it instead of buying some "temp beater" and taking even longer to buy the car I really wanted when I needed it and I paid it back with priority (i.e. faster than the financing terms required it).
Temp beaters are not that bad, if you choose them wisely (like a boring 3-year old Toyota). Nothing fancy, no surprises, years ahead with just basic service. And a small crash will only break your car, not your heart.
I bought a new vehicle in 2023 after years of not owning a car. I was trying to buy used, but the delta between new and 1-3 year old used was so small it made no sense to go used. I was giving up a warranty for often times $500-$1500, total.
This is still true, and especially true for brands whose used vehicles command a price premium, like Toyota. Used values are still high relative to historical norms because a lot of the market that normally buys new vehicles is priced out of buying new, and some of that demand has been absorbed by the used market (some of it has dropped out of the market and/or deferred a purchase until later).
The idea of buying a relatively low miles 3-year old Toyota for materially less than a new one doesn't really exist, currently. Now, if you want to go for a 3 year old car with 150,000+ miles, sure, you can save some money, but that's a ton of miles per year. You're counting on the previous owner(s) being _really_ on top of their basic maintenance.
How much cheaper is a boring 3-year old Toyota versus a boring brand new Toyota? Why would the person who buys a boring new Toyota unload it for a significant loss after just 3 years of ownership?
a 3 year old toyota is a temp beater? I bought a 5 year old toyota and consider that pretty luxury compared to the 7-10 year old cars I've always previously purchased (edit: and I'd never call them beaters either, I've always looked after them). I've never financed a car, I think it's a crazy thing to do when there are so many good used cars available. And new doesn't mean without problems either, usually you can get good information on the reliability of older models that you won't know for new ones.
3 year is not a beater. My dad used to buy a new car every 3 years, back in the hey days when his company would have a deal with the local dealership (of one particular brand that they like for some reason - probably CEO friendship or something) to get their employees better terms (without negotiating), so we enjoyed a new car every 3-ish years when I was a kid. But that's not a beater.
The beater cars I owned were about 10 years old when I bought them. And I drove them for like 3-ish more years before selling again.
When I bought my most recent car I drove the financing guy nuts because I kept going back to total price instead of caring about payments. Was clearly making him sweat a little bit.
Basic personal finance should be one of the top things people learn in high school. It's wild how many people have no concept of how loans and interest rates work. I didn't learn anything about that stuff before high school and it's some of the most important knowledge for a typical consumer in our society.
I just read that the average price of a car is now more than 50k. People are insane to buy these with huge loans. There are plenty of very nice cars in the 20k-40k range but somehow people feel compelled to spend a ton of money on their cars.
I've read that the average going above $50k for the first time in the US is largely due to two things:
1. There is enough financial uncertainty that many people are putting off buying a new car for now. The people most worried are also the people who would be buying one of those $20-40k cars. It's the upper end buyers who aren't being affected much by the uncertainty, so the average has gone up.
2. A lot of people bought EVs, which are more expensive than similar ICE cars, in the first 3 quarters to beat the end of the tax credits.
The solution to that corruption can't be to just stop giving aid or hiring your own (corrupt) NGOs. That's the whole problem with DOGE. Instead of taking on the difficult work of making things more efficient they did a quick hit and run job to cut things they didn't understand or Musk didn't like.
If you have many choices that are within a small range, it's the opposite of freedom. It's more about control. But it works extremely well to give the illusion of freedom.
You see that in our political discourse. Debates over things like gay marriage, immigration or abortion are encouraged because they don't cost the oligarchy any money. Discussion about things like income inequality that may reduce the power and wealth of the upper class is discouraged.
I always find it interesting that people who went to elite schools like Stanford are telling others that this is not needed. Or CEOs who make multi million salaries explaining that work is about culture and fulfillment and you should not be after money.
Thiel’s philosophy and that of a lot of other Silicon Valley guys seems to condense to “ we are smart and right and everybody else is stupid”.
Yeah, I actually think PT is sincere in his take that prestige actually does matter and so does school as a measure of IQ and ambition, even if you disagree with him -- but I think his larger posse has translated that message to "you shouldn't go to college and build a B2B SaaS instead. Like Patrick Collison!" Which is harmful and dumb.
