Buying a beat-up used car is risky. They are cheap for a reason, they have repairs that cost thousands. And cascading repairs, you don't know what else is wrong until the first problem is fixed, and the first problem itself is $3000 - $5000. The article has anecdotes that worked out for some people, but it doesn't work out for most people. It is like buying a lottery ticket.
Buying a new cheap car is the safest, and I'm sure there are always some models available under 20K.
Poor people (or even non-poor people) can buy the cheapest transportation available. US used to have the cheapest cars in the world. Its completely changed now, all you need to do is to ask your administrators to let the manufacturers from China bring them in.
Ask your admin to allow cheap cars/KEI/golf and work with your local city to build walk/bike/golf-cart trials. Its a one time cost, you can make transportation cheap permanently.
The Poor Man’s Shoe Theory, widely known as the Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness, is a concept that explains how those who are poor often end up spending more in the long run because they can’t afford to make quality purchases up front. This idea was popularized by Terry Pratchett, the acclaimed British writer, in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms, through a passage in which the character Captain Sam Vimes observes the realities of poverty and consumption.
“Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.”
“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
Nobody is selling you a used Lexus or Toyota or Honda for cheap. It is usually a nondescript brand and model, like a geo metro or a model with known reliability issues.
How do you expect their material conditions to improve if nobody attempts to get more stuff to them?
I doubt the "HN crowd" was about to do anything, but it'd be better if someone saw some sort of market opportunity here. It sounds pretty miserable not being able to get to a well paid job. I personally appreciate all the people who lent me money and sold me cars. It enabled a lot of income for me, over a lifetime.
Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale.
US automakers have chosen to abandon anything not a $40k-$100k SUV or pickup truck, and purposely minimize production to optimize for profits over volume. You can either leave the country, pay the captive market tax, or import a cheap car when allowed to.
Chinese automakers cannot find enough marine capacity for exports at the moment (currently at a ~12M unit/year export run rate). Imports are allowed eventually imho, it’s just a matter of when (elections and representation turnover rate). Until then, the poor are held hostage for profits (as is tradition in the US).
The things you’re describing aren’t “alternatives to driving.” They perform a different function. Most Americans don’t aspire to live like Chinese people packed into high rises with 0.8 kids taking the train to work. They want to live where they want to live, then take their 2-3 kids to school and themselves to work 10-15 miles away without having to plan their lives around a public transit schedule.
A majority of American households (58.4%) are childless and ~80% of Americans live in urban areas per the US Census Bureau. I think you might be misreading the desires of most Americans, based on the data.
I agree Americans love their cars, but will they love them with oil prices above $100-$120/barrel persistently? To be determined.
> Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.
> According to the 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, approximately 286 million Americans (roughly 94 percent of the population) live in metropolitan statistical areas. Just 17.7 million people, about 6 percent, live entirely outside any metro or micropolitan area.
> The popular image of America as a land of small towns and open plains is, statistically speaking, a minority experience. The story of 21st-century America is, above all, a story of cities.
In the long term, yes, but infrastructure projects are famously drawn out in the US due to meddling from NIMBYs, companies puppeting sham environmental groups, and third parties forcing their way in and holding projects hostage unless they get a slice of the pie among other things.
It’s a battle worth fighting but public transport infrastructure isn’t going to happen overnight and people will need cars that won’t bankrupt them until then.
Never happens on the timescale of the next decade, maybe two. How far along is California high speed rail? When did they start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail (construction began in 2015 and it won’t be operational until at least 2031, 16 years later) If you break ground today, you won’t see new public infrastructure operational for at least a decade. Brightline light rail was built in Florida and is approaching insolvency, even with 3M riders per year.
We could provide subsidies to move the disadvantaged to major urban cores with public transportation systems, I’d support that. Have to find the funds to do it though. Cheaper than trying to build anything new in the US for sure.
I hear this a lot, but it’s not an excuse for never starting. Amsterdam started taking their non-car infrastructure seriously in the 1970s and now it’s seen as an example for the rest of the world.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
Asking to see a realistic roadmap and timeline is being a realist, not a defeatist. If Amsterdam started in the 1970s, that’s fifty years ago. Maybe we can make progress by the 2060s-2070s? Or we can just wait for China to manufacture all the EVs the world needs. Which is more likely to occur first?
Consider the US has $40T in debt and no will to raise taxes at this time, and therefore no will to spend on public infrastructure projects. Where will the capital come from?
How and when will we start? How many elections need to occur to appropriate funding? How much of the US electorate has to turn over for the right people to be elected to appropriate funding? Until shovels are in the ground, it’s vaporware and dreams.
It doesn’t have to be a massive nationwide project on par with the national highway project. It can start with local communities.
The mayor of Carmel, IN thought traffic circles were better than intersections and wanted more mixed use development. They have that now, nearly every intersection in the city has been replaced over time as they were due for routine work.
In Detroit they are in the process of building out a 29 mile greenway around the city.
These city level projects are a lot more important than the national ones, when it comes to reducing car traffic in cities and having an impact on people’s most frequent trips.
Seeing this at a local level could inspire more rail connections between cities, which could also come from the private sector. We have already seen a couple examples of this.
For anything funded by the federal government, you’re right. They have a huge mess on their hands, and need to get serious about cleaning it up. They have no business kicking of any major public works projects until that happens (though that has never stopped them in the past). But at a local level, things can still move forward and we are seeing it happen to some extent, though it often still feels more like a hobby than a firm conviction.
> Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale
No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban electronics in cars so you can actually hold onto them and repair them yourself.
The US lost that global argument when it decided financialization mattered more than manufacturing. A majority of Americans cannot afford their basic needs to be met on their income, it’s not “a bit more expensive,” and it’s for legacy auto profits, not to maintain domestic production capacity.
No one is banning electronics in cars, and US legacy auto will never catch up. They made their choice to prioritize profits over investment.
> While the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—accounted for 92 percent of domestic auto share in 1965, this share would fall by half, to 46 percent, by 2015, and to 38 percent by 2024.
> From 1995 to 2022, China’s share of global automotive vehicle output skyrocketed eightfold, from 3 to 25 percent, while the U.S. share slid from 23 to 14 percent.
> In 2007, cars sold in the United States contained 38 percent U.S.- or Canadian-made content on average; that portion declined to 18 percent by 2023.
(BYD sells more EVs internationally than Ford does in total, and they intend to be the largest global automaker in the next five years)
No sane poor person would buy a used Mercedes. Parts and repair would cost more than the car. The only people that would think a $1000 Mercedes is worth it would be rich.
A W123 mercedes (late 1970s-early 1980s) is an exceptionally well built car. Reliable, easy to work on yourself if you're handy, parts not expensive. At this point they're getting hard to find and prices for decent ones are climbing but for a long time they were a great car and easy to find for low thousands.
You could say similar things about older BMWs. People leave notes on my 2004 Honda CR-V asking if I want to sell. A Honda civic I put on Craigslist took less than hour to sell. Repairability of any used car is becoming increasing problematic. Nursing an old automobile past its prime is becoming a lost art:)
I've owned two Hondas and I would not touch another one. Both had transmission failures at under 200K miles, and numerous less serious issues. I will say that the engines seem good.
Depends on the Mercedes. There was a time where Mercedes made cars that had a reputation for reliability similar to Toyota's today, and those cars are still fairly reasonable to keep running. The problem is that they're now becoming collectors items. Anything from the last 25 years though? Best to look elsewhere.
What about selling busses and trains, and buildings bike lanes and train tracks? Loans and cars aren't the solution to loans and cars, but there are solutions.
I lived in a place for a few years that had a free public transportation network. I can’t tell you how liberating that was, because it meant that I could get to lots of places without owning a vehicle. They even had bike racks on the busses, which meant that you could easily cover the last mile.
That place decided that free public transportation was a good investment. I think many people here would see it as a waste of their tax money. But those people are not low income. They can afford to buy cars. I occasionally hear my coworkers remark about how they would never ride one of those city busses—YUCK. It kind of grinds my gears.
Living in that place made me feel like the community actually cared about me. It made a big impact on how I think about what is worth spending my taxes on. We already subsidize the middle class (roads ain’t free!) and we subsidize the heck out of corporate America. A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom.
Plus, money isn’t always the reason people can’t or don’t drive. People may have disabilities that prevent them from driving. Heck, some people just don’t like driving. Improving public transit, biking, and pedestrian infrastructure solves most of these issues, and it’s frustrating how car-centric the US is in most places.
Before getting a job in software, I used to buy cars from insurance auctions. Plenty of cars that run and drive end up there for various reason and if you were patient, you could get running and driving cars for $1000 or less (This was 7+ years ago). The catch is that you don't know what you're getting. You either have to have be mechanically inclined or know somebody who is to walk the lot and check the cars out before you bid.
Case and point, I bought a car that was fine when we inspected it, but when they picked it up with the forklift they knocked a hole in the oil pan, and we had to get it towed. $100 for a new oil pan (for the wrong year lol) and I got many years out of it.
One solution that exists in third world is motorbikes. New motorbikes cost ~$1000. These are perfectly acceptable, ideal for the western economies, if there are enough of them on the road, it will get safer. One bike in between 10,000 cars is hard to see, but enough of them create bike-awareness.
China's EV cars are known, but it also has 350 million electric motorbikes.
My wife was from Reno, I was from NY. The week before we got married (in 1996) we were out there and her sister lent us a 1979 F150 at about 2O0k miles —- 3-on-the-tree, no air, AM radio, lap belts. The passenger door would fly open on left turns unless it was locked. I nearly lost my brother when I picked him up at the airport and forgot to warn him.
Maybe cause I was about to get married but I loved that truck.
I always wanted to try a three one the tree, just cause they were so different. Alas all the cars I've ever owned were 5 or 6 speeds. Today I drive an EV with no gears. Maybe someday a collector will trust me with his car - but I wouldn't myself with something classic.
Wow! This didn't last long on the front page. Strange - I thought it was an honest and informative little article.
I noticed it on the front page. An hour later, it's on page 3.
<edit>
Now I'm just curious to see how fast the downward trajectory is on this currently 70-post article is. Still in the 1-2 hour range and now it is on page 4 of HN.
In the course of my work I deal with organizations who sell cars out of impound lots. There is a whole capitalistic recycling industry of buying junked cars and reassembling them into functioning vehicles again.
Interestingly, a fair portion of junked cars get shipped overseas where the labor is very, very low cost and high tech, cheap labor chop shops in places like India or in some countries in Africa will have highly skilled workers basically cut out crumple zones and restore completely totaled vehicles into new looking cars and turn around and sell them. This would never be viable here in the States because of the labor cost, but when you are paying someone $1 USD a day to do highly skilled and technical labor like this it becomes very viable.
Another popular tactic where I live in Texas is to steal a car and drive it south of the border and strip it. Then buy a junked car same make and model with a clean VIN. Then ship that clean VIN second car south of the border as well and rebuild it with the stolen parts and ship it back over for resale.
I'm not poor but I think it's ridiculous to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a car. I learned that after buying a new car when I got my first job. Since then about $5k is my limit.
My newest and most expensive car cost $5k in freedom dollars. It gets the job done. I have an older, more clapped out vehicle that cost $1500, and is in surprisingly decent knick for a 30 year old car, but it does need a paint job and some imminent TLC to keep it from deteriorating. That will cost more than it's worth, but I think it's worth doing in the long run.
> Car debt is terrible. But many people can’t get car debt, because many banks won’t write a $3,000 car loan, much less to someone with unsteady income. The bottom quintile often can’t even reach the $1,000 car - it’s hard to get out of the cycle where you can’t get a job because you don’t have a car. When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them.
Banger post. My first car was a $1200 Geo Prism that I bought through the mechanic shop at the gas station up the street. It was older than my (younger) brother; got a good 5 years out of it before the transmission literally fell apart on Rt 2.
My grandfather bought me a $200 Ford Taurus at a car auction. I hated that car. It was this ugly green color and handled like a boat. But I drove it for many years, mostly to part-time jobs waiting tables or working at a butcher shop when I was in college. It finally met its end one winter in Worcester, Mass when the road salt ate through the flange that held the exhaust pipe on. This happened while idling in the parking lot in front of a Jo-Ann Fabrics store. If you’ve never experienced an unmuffled V6, think twin engine turboprop loud. A kind employee at Jo-Ann came up with a clever solution to hold the exhaust pipe against the chassis using baling wire so that I could at least drive it without the exhaust pipe dragging on the ground. I continued to drive that car, until my neighbors complained that the “tank noise” was waking them up in the morning. I replaced that car with another car that was even worse, but that’s another story.
I am comfortably middle class now. I still buy budget cars because I can’t get past how outrageously expensive most cars are now. But even now I still think, every time I sit in my new (well, three year old) car: wow, this is awesome. I don’t know if my friends think those same thoughts, because I would be honestly a little embarrassed to explain why I feel that way.
I think that anyone who has not experienced the slow churn of driving a car with the engine light on for years, some duct tape holding something in it, is missing nothing. But I still feel like a child with a base modern family car. It is the hint of time travel we are allowed.
It's not fun or bragging-worthy or anything. The "haha the driver door doesn't open" bits are very different from getting stranded in random places. The only good experience is if you manage to fix it for cheap.
I have one piece of junk and one newer (ie 2012) car, so I get to experience the difference every week. Except, the driver side window doesn't work in either car. Wish power windows weren't invented.
I guess it can be like the Terry Pratchett boot theory a bit. But yeah even among your circle, you need to be careful. I know somebody who got a junk car for a bad price because it was from somebody in their circle and everyone else vouched for the seller.
Very few people buying a new car keep it long enough to make it cheaper than buying $5-10k cars.
The last cheaper used car I bought, I kept for about 10 years, it was $10k. I sold it to my brother in-law after that, who had it another 5 years… it would have gone longer, but he didn’t realized I had changed the timing belt before I sold it to him, so he misjudged how long the one he put on would last, and it destroyed the engine… anyway, let’s go with it..
The last new car I got, was relatively inexpensive, as far as new cars go, at $35k. If a $10k used car ran for 15 years, I’d have to keep that $35k car for over 50 years to make it worth it.
New cars are almost never financially justifiable. And that new car will run into the same maintenance issues and costs as the used one as it ages.
The nicer the car, the worse this equation gets, as increased car pricing translates to luxury, not quality. This makes them very different from work boots.
It's higher in Los Angeles. And I don't know if they have licenses. What I've heard is if they get in an accident and can't drive away, they run away on foot and report the car stolen. That doesn't explain how they avoid getting pulled over.
Usually, normal insurance is reasonable, or if it's not, you get liability only because the difference in cost is enough to buy another car after a few years.
Unfortunately there's a fair bit if industry built around charging people who are stretched financially more, but it's possible to avoid that.
Having more wealth if anything has had me buy less insurance. My newer car is liability only. Worst case if it blows up, I can afford a cheap replacement that I've already more than saved up for by not paying full coverage.
Also, that $4K cash for clunkers was a lot. I agree with the author, that would've totally gone into my pocket if they did it today. I still have my old car from college that's worth about $500 now, purchased for $1500, and I don't need it.
If you can afford to eat the loss, don’t insure it.
Obviously insurance companies make money on average for every policy. If they didn’t, they would go bankrupt. So on average, every time you buy insurance, you lose.
So insure only what’s required by law, or things that would throw your life off track if they vanished.
Yep. Which is also why I find vision insurance ridiculous. No it doesn't cover me going blind, it covers a pair of glasses at best, more like 25% of one.
My insurance is getting to the point where I might do the same. My car is worth maybe a third of what it was new, and my monthly insurance bill is the same, it's nuts. I may go with a significantly higher deductible as a compromise.
I drove a $1000 car for a long time back in my poor days. You could get minimum liability insurance for $50/month or even less. Just whatever you needed to be able to drive legally. Thankfully I was never in any crashes but I always drove with the expectation that crashing would be financially ruinous and tried to be extra careful.
I have never owned a vehicle newer than 20 years old, I have just never seen the point of doing so. The financial math just never worked out.
With that said, I have always done my research and managed to obtain vehicles which, after maybe some high-importance fixes in the beginning, managed to last another 5-20 years without any other major work done to them.
Hell, aside from oil changes and minor fixes that I did entirely by myself, I got my last car for nearly free and it lasted me a good decade before some idiot with a jacked-up pickup - he couldn’t even see me behind him - backed into me even though I was laying on the horn like crazy.
Besides, anything prior to 2006 is going to be much easier to fix, does not have DRM, and will not spy on you unless it comes with OnStar.
Honestly, the biggest pain point these days is the lack of a true manual clutch, with the full three pedals on the floor. These vehicles are becoming distressingly rare.
My first car was $1k bought in Michigan in 2006. It was a massive POS and took $1,500 in repairs to run reliably. I immediately bought a $7k car when I got a job.
I still drive a '97 4runner that I bought for 5k around 2020. I've probably put 5k into repairs. I've spent less on it than anything I could buy new, and it will probably outlast us all. Nearing 300k miles on it now.
Very smart to go with a Toyota! I did the opposite and learned the hard way that the 'discount' for buying American will be paid for in $3k increments whenever it wants over the next few years until your finally give up and just buy the Toyota you should have bought to begin with.
Buying a beat-up used car is risky. They are cheap for a reason, they have repairs that cost thousands. And cascading repairs, you don't know what else is wrong until the first problem is fixed, and the first problem itself is $3000 - $5000. The article has anecdotes that worked out for some people, but it doesn't work out for most people. It is like buying a lottery ticket.
Buying a new cheap car is the safest, and I'm sure there are always some models available under 20K.
Poor people (or even non-poor people) can buy the cheapest transportation available. US used to have the cheapest cars in the world. Its completely changed now, all you need to do is to ask your administrators to let the manufacturers from China bring them in.
1) They can buy a cheap car that will cost nothing in fuel. This is the worlds cheapest SOLAR CAR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk6aTKV-des
2) They can buy EV KEI cars (https://insideevs.com/news/807141/byd-racco-kei-driven-japan...)
3) They can ask for biking trials to be built. Atlanta seems to have built many miles of connected trials.
4) EV Golf carts are a perfectly acceptable form of transportation: https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-golf-cart-kingdom/
Ask your admin to allow cheap cars/KEI/golf and work with your local city to build walk/bike/golf-cart trials. Its a one time cost, you can make transportation cheap permanently.
Poor people can't afford a new $13K car. EVs also make less sense if you live in an apartment.
Agreed, and thats why we have the boots theory.
The Poor Man’s Shoe Theory, widely known as the Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness, is a concept that explains how those who are poor often end up spending more in the long run because they can’t afford to make quality purchases up front. This idea was popularized by Terry Pratchett, the acclaimed British writer, in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms, through a passage in which the character Captain Sam Vimes observes the realities of poverty and consumption.
“Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.”
“But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
https://footwearmagazine.com/poor-man-shoe-theory-poverty-co...
I don't even think the cheap used cars are a more expensive way to live on average. If you get unlucky or scammed, sure.
Nobody is selling you a used Lexus or Toyota or Honda for cheap. It is usually a nondescript brand and model, like a geo metro or a model with known reliability issues.
Dear HN crowd: this is not a market opportunity. Not for loans, not for cars. Just … leave it alone. K, thx, bye.
How do you expect their material conditions to improve if nobody attempts to get more stuff to them?
I doubt the "HN crowd" was about to do anything, but it'd be better if someone saw some sort of market opportunity here. It sounds pretty miserable not being able to get to a well paid job. I personally appreciate all the people who lent me money and sold me cars. It enabled a lot of income for me, over a lifetime.
Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale.
US automakers have chosen to abandon anything not a $40k-$100k SUV or pickup truck, and purposely minimize production to optimize for profits over volume. You can either leave the country, pay the captive market tax, or import a cheap car when allowed to.
Chinese automakers cannot find enough marine capacity for exports at the moment (currently at a ~12M unit/year export run rate). Imports are allowed eventually imho, it’s just a matter of when (elections and representation turnover rate). Until then, the poor are held hostage for profits (as is tradition in the US).
The solution to car problems is not more cars. It's serious alternatives to driving. We don't need Chinese cars. We need trains, busses, and bikes.
The things you’re describing aren’t “alternatives to driving.” They perform a different function. Most Americans don’t aspire to live like Chinese people packed into high rises with 0.8 kids taking the train to work. They want to live where they want to live, then take their 2-3 kids to school and themselves to work 10-15 miles away without having to plan their lives around a public transit schedule.
A majority of American households (58.4%) are childless and ~80% of Americans live in urban areas per the US Census Bureau. I think you might be misreading the desires of most Americans, based on the data.
I agree Americans love their cars, but will they love them with oil prices above $100-$120/barrel persistently? To be determined.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/how-american-households-hav...
> Personal preference plays a significant role in changing attitudes toward parenthood. Among Americans under 50 without children, 57% said they simply didn’t want kids, while 44% preferred to focus on other priorities. Financial concerns also weighed heavily, with 36% citing the cost of raising children—three times the rate among childless people over 50.
https://www.socialexplorer.com/home/post/the-us-urban-popula...
> According to the 2020–2024 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, approximately 286 million Americans (roughly 94 percent of the population) live in metropolitan statistical areas. Just 17.7 million people, about 6 percent, live entirely outside any metro or micropolitan area.
> The popular image of America as a land of small towns and open plains is, statistically speaking, a minority experience. The story of 21st-century America is, above all, a story of cities.
In the long term, yes, but infrastructure projects are famously drawn out in the US due to meddling from NIMBYs, companies puppeting sham environmental groups, and third parties forcing their way in and holding projects hostage unless they get a slice of the pie among other things.
It’s a battle worth fighting but public transport infrastructure isn’t going to happen overnight and people will need cars that won’t bankrupt them until then.
https://vividmaps.com/public-transportation-in-the-united-st...
Never happens on the timescale of the next decade, maybe two. How far along is California high speed rail? When did they start?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail (construction began in 2015 and it won’t be operational until at least 2031, 16 years later) If you break ground today, you won’t see new public infrastructure operational for at least a decade. Brightline light rail was built in Florida and is approaching insolvency, even with 3M riders per year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline
We could provide subsidies to move the disadvantaged to major urban cores with public transportation systems, I’d support that. Have to find the funds to do it though. Cheaper than trying to build anything new in the US for sure.
https://dailyyonder.com/half-of-all-rural-counties-are-losin...
https://ecpmlangues.unistra.fr/civilization/geography/map-us...
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/poverty-area-measures...
(Where will those bikes, busses, and trains you mention be built? China, as they are 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity)
I hear this a lot, but it’s not an excuse for never starting. Amsterdam started taking their non-car infrastructure seriously in the 1970s and now it’s seen as an example for the rest of the world.
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
Asking to see a realistic roadmap and timeline is being a realist, not a defeatist. If Amsterdam started in the 1970s, that’s fifty years ago. Maybe we can make progress by the 2060s-2070s? Or we can just wait for China to manufacture all the EVs the world needs. Which is more likely to occur first?
Consider the US has $40T in debt and no will to raise taxes at this time, and therefore no will to spend on public infrastructure projects. Where will the capital come from?
How and when will we start? How many elections need to occur to appropriate funding? How much of the US electorate has to turn over for the right people to be elected to appropriate funding? Until shovels are in the ground, it’s vaporware and dreams.
It doesn’t have to be a massive nationwide project on par with the national highway project. It can start with local communities.
The mayor of Carmel, IN thought traffic circles were better than intersections and wanted more mixed use development. They have that now, nearly every intersection in the city has been replaced over time as they were due for routine work.
In Detroit they are in the process of building out a 29 mile greenway around the city.
These city level projects are a lot more important than the national ones, when it comes to reducing car traffic in cities and having an impact on people’s most frequent trips.
Seeing this at a local level could inspire more rail connections between cities, which could also come from the private sector. We have already seen a couple examples of this.
For anything funded by the federal government, you’re right. They have a huge mess on their hands, and need to get serious about cleaning it up. They have no business kicking of any major public works projects until that happens (though that has never stopped them in the past). But at a local level, things can still move forward and we are seeing it happen to some extent, though it often still feels more like a hobby than a firm conviction.
> Vote for people who will drop tariffs and allow the import of cheap EVs manufactured at scale
No. Globalism is bad. Better to have cars made domestically that are a bit more expensive to buy, but support local jobs. Better yet, ban electronics in cars so you can actually hold onto them and repair them yourself.
The US lost that global argument when it decided financialization mattered more than manufacturing. A majority of Americans cannot afford their basic needs to be met on their income, it’s not “a bit more expensive,” and it’s for legacy auto profits, not to maintain domestic production capacity.
No one is banning electronics in cars, and US legacy auto will never catch up. They made their choice to prioritize profits over investment.
Assessing the Evolving Global Competitiveness of the US Auto Industry - https://itif.org/publications/2026/03/23/assessing-evolving-... - March 23rd, 2026
> While the Big Three automakers—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—accounted for 92 percent of domestic auto share in 1965, this share would fall by half, to 46 percent, by 2015, and to 38 percent by 2024.
> From 1995 to 2022, China’s share of global automotive vehicle output skyrocketed eightfold, from 3 to 25 percent, while the U.S. share slid from 23 to 14 percent.
> In 2007, cars sold in the United States contained 38 percent U.S.- or Canadian-made content on average; that portion declined to 18 percent by 2023.
(BYD sells more EVs internationally than Ford does in total, and they intend to be the largest global automaker in the next five years)
I'm sure this post will start dozens of AI startups to help poor people with their car buying experience.
No sane poor person would buy a used Mercedes. Parts and repair would cost more than the car. The only people that would think a $1000 Mercedes is worth it would be rich.
A W123 mercedes (late 1970s-early 1980s) is an exceptionally well built car. Reliable, easy to work on yourself if you're handy, parts not expensive. At this point they're getting hard to find and prices for decent ones are climbing but for a long time they were a great car and easy to find for low thousands.
You could say similar things about older BMWs. People leave notes on my 2004 Honda CR-V asking if I want to sell. A Honda civic I put on Craigslist took less than hour to sell. Repairability of any used car is becoming increasing problematic. Nursing an old automobile past its prime is becoming a lost art:)
I've owned two Hondas and I would not touch another one. Both had transmission failures at under 200K miles, and numerous less serious issues. I will say that the engines seem good.
Depends on the Mercedes. There was a time where Mercedes made cars that had a reputation for reliability similar to Toyota's today, and those cars are still fairly reasonable to keep running. The problem is that they're now becoming collectors items. Anything from the last 25 years though? Best to look elsewhere.
Its W123. Build like a tank, things that break are easy to repair by hand in the driveway.
What about selling busses and trains, and buildings bike lanes and train tracks? Loans and cars aren't the solution to loans and cars, but there are solutions.
I lived in a place for a few years that had a free public transportation network. I can’t tell you how liberating that was, because it meant that I could get to lots of places without owning a vehicle. They even had bike racks on the busses, which meant that you could easily cover the last mile.
That place decided that free public transportation was a good investment. I think many people here would see it as a waste of their tax money. But those people are not low income. They can afford to buy cars. I occasionally hear my coworkers remark about how they would never ride one of those city busses—YUCK. It kind of grinds my gears.
Living in that place made me feel like the community actually cared about me. It made a big impact on how I think about what is worth spending my taxes on. We already subsidize the middle class (roads ain’t free!) and we subsidize the heck out of corporate America. A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom.
> A small slice of those subsidies would make a big difference for people at the bottom.
More than half of the federal budget is for entitlements.
Plus, money isn’t always the reason people can’t or don’t drive. People may have disabilities that prevent them from driving. Heck, some people just don’t like driving. Improving public transit, biking, and pedestrian infrastructure solves most of these issues, and it’s frustrating how car-centric the US is in most places.
The OP addresses that:
"When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them."
Most people hate all drivers except themselves.
Well that was random
Too late – we're going to see "Show HN" posts of vibe coded apps related to this in 48 hours
Before getting a job in software, I used to buy cars from insurance auctions. Plenty of cars that run and drive end up there for various reason and if you were patient, you could get running and driving cars for $1000 or less (This was 7+ years ago). The catch is that you don't know what you're getting. You either have to have be mechanically inclined or know somebody who is to walk the lot and check the cars out before you bid.
Case and point, I bought a car that was fine when we inspected it, but when they picked it up with the forklift they knocked a hole in the oil pan, and we had to get it towed. $100 for a new oil pan (for the wrong year lol) and I got many years out of it.
One solution that exists in third world is motorbikes. New motorbikes cost ~$1000. These are perfectly acceptable, ideal for the western economies, if there are enough of them on the road, it will get safer. One bike in between 10,000 cars is hard to see, but enough of them create bike-awareness.
China's EV cars are known, but it also has 350 million electric motorbikes.
Not third-world, but one thing that struck me visiting Barcelona was they had a lot of motorcycles, and all kinds of people rode them.
My wife was from Reno, I was from NY. The week before we got married (in 1996) we were out there and her sister lent us a 1979 F150 at about 2O0k miles —- 3-on-the-tree, no air, AM radio, lap belts. The passenger door would fly open on left turns unless it was locked. I nearly lost my brother when I picked him up at the airport and forgot to warn him.
Maybe cause I was about to get married but I loved that truck.
I always wanted to try a three one the tree, just cause they were so different. Alas all the cars I've ever owned were 5 or 6 speeds. Today I drive an EV with no gears. Maybe someday a collector will trust me with his car - but I wouldn't myself with something classic.
Wow! This didn't last long on the front page. Strange - I thought it was an honest and informative little article.
I noticed it on the front page. An hour later, it's on page 3.
<edit>
Now I'm just curious to see how fast the downward trajectory is on this currently 70-post article is. Still in the 1-2 hour range and now it is on page 4 of HN.
In the course of my work I deal with organizations who sell cars out of impound lots. There is a whole capitalistic recycling industry of buying junked cars and reassembling them into functioning vehicles again.
Interestingly, a fair portion of junked cars get shipped overseas where the labor is very, very low cost and high tech, cheap labor chop shops in places like India or in some countries in Africa will have highly skilled workers basically cut out crumple zones and restore completely totaled vehicles into new looking cars and turn around and sell them. This would never be viable here in the States because of the labor cost, but when you are paying someone $1 USD a day to do highly skilled and technical labor like this it becomes very viable.
Another popular tactic where I live in Texas is to steal a car and drive it south of the border and strip it. Then buy a junked car same make and model with a clean VIN. Then ship that clean VIN second car south of the border as well and rebuild it with the stolen parts and ship it back over for resale.
My current car is 54 years old. I bought it in 1986.
I'm not poor but I think it's ridiculous to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a car. I learned that after buying a new car when I got my first job. Since then about $5k is my limit.
My newest and most expensive car cost $5k in freedom dollars. It gets the job done. I have an older, more clapped out vehicle that cost $1500, and is in surprisingly decent knick for a 30 year old car, but it does need a paint job and some imminent TLC to keep it from deteriorating. That will cost more than it's worth, but I think it's worth doing in the long run.
> Car debt is terrible. But many people can’t get car debt, because many banks won’t write a $3,000 car loan, much less to someone with unsteady income. The bottom quintile often can’t even reach the $1,000 car - it’s hard to get out of the cycle where you can’t get a job because you don’t have a car. When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them.
Banger post. My first car was a $1200 Geo Prism that I bought through the mechanic shop at the gas station up the street. It was older than my (younger) brother; got a good 5 years out of it before the transmission literally fell apart on Rt 2.
My grandfather bought me a $200 Ford Taurus at a car auction. I hated that car. It was this ugly green color and handled like a boat. But I drove it for many years, mostly to part-time jobs waiting tables or working at a butcher shop when I was in college. It finally met its end one winter in Worcester, Mass when the road salt ate through the flange that held the exhaust pipe on. This happened while idling in the parking lot in front of a Jo-Ann Fabrics store. If you’ve never experienced an unmuffled V6, think twin engine turboprop loud. A kind employee at Jo-Ann came up with a clever solution to hold the exhaust pipe against the chassis using baling wire so that I could at least drive it without the exhaust pipe dragging on the ground. I continued to drive that car, until my neighbors complained that the “tank noise” was waking them up in the morning. I replaced that car with another car that was even worse, but that’s another story.
I am comfortably middle class now. I still buy budget cars because I can’t get past how outrageously expensive most cars are now. But even now I still think, every time I sit in my new (well, three year old) car: wow, this is awesome. I don’t know if my friends think those same thoughts, because I would be honestly a little embarrassed to explain why I feel that way.
I think that anyone who has not experienced the slow churn of driving a car with the engine light on for years, some duct tape holding something in it, is missing nothing. But I still feel like a child with a base modern family car. It is the hint of time travel we are allowed.
It's not fun or bragging-worthy or anything. The "haha the driver door doesn't open" bits are very different from getting stranded in random places. The only good experience is if you manage to fix it for cheap.
I have one piece of junk and one newer (ie 2012) car, so I get to experience the difference every week. Except, the driver side window doesn't work in either car. Wish power windows weren't invented.
I guess it can be like the Terry Pratchett boot theory a bit. But yeah even among your circle, you need to be careful. I know somebody who got a junk car for a bad price because it was from somebody in their circle and everyone else vouched for the seller.
Very few people buying a new car keep it long enough to make it cheaper than buying $5-10k cars.
The last cheaper used car I bought, I kept for about 10 years, it was $10k. I sold it to my brother in-law after that, who had it another 5 years… it would have gone longer, but he didn’t realized I had changed the timing belt before I sold it to him, so he misjudged how long the one he put on would last, and it destroyed the engine… anyway, let’s go with it..
The last new car I got, was relatively inexpensive, as far as new cars go, at $35k. If a $10k used car ran for 15 years, I’d have to keep that $35k car for over 50 years to make it worth it.
New cars are almost never financially justifiable. And that new car will run into the same maintenance issues and costs as the used one as it ages.
The nicer the car, the worse this equation gets, as increased car pricing translates to luxury, not quality. This makes them very different from work boots.
I'm curious about the insurance aspect of this, do people buying $1000 cars forego insurance?
At that tier you buy minimum coverage liability. That coverage is pretty cheap, but even so, many choose to risk it.
Supposedly about 20% of drivers in El Paso are uninsured, so yes?
Texas needs to be stricter about this and start suspending licenses
Suspending licences doesn't stop people from driving anymore than not having insurance doesn't.
It’s a deterrence and enforcement mechanism. Because if you get pulled over, you might go to jail in some states.
It's higher in Los Angeles. And I don't know if they have licenses. What I've heard is if they get in an accident and can't drive away, they run away on foot and report the car stolen. That doesn't explain how they avoid getting pulled over.
Usually, normal insurance is reasonable, or if it's not, you get liability only because the difference in cost is enough to buy another car after a few years.
Unfortunately there's a fair bit if industry built around charging people who are stretched financially more, but it's possible to avoid that.
Having more wealth if anything has had me buy less insurance. My newer car is liability only. Worst case if it blows up, I can afford a cheap replacement that I've already more than saved up for by not paying full coverage.
Also, that $4K cash for clunkers was a lot. I agree with the author, that would've totally gone into my pocket if they did it today. I still have my old car from college that's worth about $500 now, purchased for $1500, and I don't need it.
If you can afford to eat the loss, don’t insure it.
Obviously insurance companies make money on average for every policy. If they didn’t, they would go bankrupt. So on average, every time you buy insurance, you lose.
So insure only what’s required by law, or things that would throw your life off track if they vanished.
Yep. Which is also why I find vision insurance ridiculous. No it doesn't cover me going blind, it covers a pair of glasses at best, more like 25% of one.
My insurance is getting to the point where I might do the same. My car is worth maybe a third of what it was new, and my monthly insurance bill is the same, it's nuts. I may go with a significantly higher deductible as a compromise.
I've eschewed collision insurance, and what I've saved on those premiums is far more than the cars were worth.
I drove a $1000 car for a long time back in my poor days. You could get minimum liability insurance for $50/month or even less. Just whatever you needed to be able to drive legally. Thankfully I was never in any crashes but I always drove with the expectation that crashing would be financially ruinous and tried to be extra careful.
They typically carry liability
Toyota Echo - perhaps the car car ever made.
I have never owned a vehicle newer than 20 years old, I have just never seen the point of doing so. The financial math just never worked out.
With that said, I have always done my research and managed to obtain vehicles which, after maybe some high-importance fixes in the beginning, managed to last another 5-20 years without any other major work done to them.
Hell, aside from oil changes and minor fixes that I did entirely by myself, I got my last car for nearly free and it lasted me a good decade before some idiot with a jacked-up pickup - he couldn’t even see me behind him - backed into me even though I was laying on the horn like crazy.
Besides, anything prior to 2006 is going to be much easier to fix, does not have DRM, and will not spy on you unless it comes with OnStar.
Honestly, the biggest pain point these days is the lack of a true manual clutch, with the full three pedals on the floor. These vehicles are becoming distressingly rare.
My first car was $1k bought in Michigan in 2006. It was a massive POS and took $1,500 in repairs to run reliably. I immediately bought a $7k car when I got a job.
I still drive a '97 4runner that I bought for 5k around 2020. I've probably put 5k into repairs. I've spent less on it than anything I could buy new, and it will probably outlast us all. Nearing 300k miles on it now.
Very smart to go with a Toyota! I did the opposite and learned the hard way that the 'discount' for buying American will be paid for in $3k increments whenever it wants over the next few years until your finally give up and just buy the Toyota you should have bought to begin with.
Nowadays Toyotas are more expensive than fords and every Toyota hybrid has a year long waitlist. Everything is priced in today.