Americans are now paying an average of $12,182 to own and operate a brand-new vehicle
Misleading title.
So new cars have gotten more expensive overall, people are buying more expensive new cars, and the cost of credit for new cars has gone up. In other words, don’t buy a brand new car.
Didn’t used car prices go up even relatively more though? Just my anecdotal experience after peeping around for a different car the past year.
They’ve started to drop pretty dramatically. My 7 year old car has lost 20% of its value in the last ~9 months.
Even not-new cars are far more expensive than most people like to thing.
Yes, fuel and insurance.
Also maintenance.
And also depreciation of the asset.
New cars are obviously much higher, but the average car is also much closer to $10k than most people are willing to admit.
That is also ignoring:
- Cost of adding a garage to a home (~10% of the home cost).
- Taxes paid on property for roads (70%+ of road construction and maintenance).
- Deferred maintenance for car infrastructure not captured above (easily in the dozens or hundreds of billions, equivalent to thousands of dollars per adult).
- Increased cost of living due to parking minimums (and “free” parking in general - - $5000 a space * 3-8 per car).
TL;DR: Car ownership has a lot of hidden costs that people hate to admit to having to bear.
For anyone who didn’t click, they’re counting “cost of owning” to also include your loan payments. New cars cost more now on average than they did previously. This is not hard to figure out.
No one – or at least practically no one – is paying $12,000 a year just in fuel and insurance.
Ok, that doesn’t sound unreasonable then if someone finances a large percentage of an expensive car. Is this clickbait?
If I’m honest it does sound a bit unreasonable if you fork out a grand a month to park two tonnes of metal outside your house most of the time, or use it to drive it to your place of work. I understand that not everybody can live in a walkable neighbourhood but the price for the privilege of sitting in traffic still seems a bit high.
It’s not a grand a month if you don’t finance a new car. The cost of owning a used car is much more affordable.
Your friendly reminder to promote and encourage development of walkable and bikeable cities/towns, and to promote good public transit!
Some resources that may be of interest:
Pretty sure that cost is going to come down significantly with EVs. Batteries are only going to get cheaper, you have less maintainance cost. Solar cars can fuel your car for the average driving distance in most places. I think smaller city EVs will become much more popular, anything between an e-bike and an electric Mini. So those will be much less expensive to buy and operate.
The only things keeping EVs expensive is just the early adopter “tax” and the high cost of batteries.