What will poor people drive ?

[javacontour]

I am in a "diverse" school district but kids are in a good school. It has probably about 10 elementary, 2 middle, and 2 high schools. As you know the boundary are drawn for each school in the US so you go to the one your house is in.

So, we have the same funding, same staff rotating around them, same management, but different parents and therefore different income level and cultural background.

You probably knows what the result look like and I will not need to say anything that will involve politics. Yes there's overlap and there are people who care in the low income under-achieving group who raised their children correctly, yet the statistics is that in our society (at least in US), parenting is a huge problem, and resources parents spend for their children vary wildly (parenting time, whether there's a housewife at home, tutoring and enrichment courses, coaching on college admission letters, whether parents teach the kids about finance and investment early, whether the parents have disciplines themselves, whether the parents divorce, whether the parents are abusive, whether the parents have addiction problem, etc).

We cannot throw money at school to get result without fixing the parents, unless you want to pay teachers to parent the kids, then you get into all sorts of political problems.

My wife is a school social worker. I witnessed her doing her job remotely most of 2020. There are certainly problem parents who are not helping their children have a brighter future.

 

[Oily_Thing]

"The poor you will always have with you"
--Jesus

 

[ripcord]

It's not all it's cracked up to be.

My sister and I are taking turns staying with my mom who is now in hospice. Spending the day watching cat videos only goes so far...

You obviously aren't consuming enough malt liquor if cat videos aren't doing it for you.

I'm being totally sarcastic, in case anybody missed it. So sorry to hear about your mom. That's a rough patch you're in.

 

[nthach]

Depends.

For a large enough manufacturer like Toyota there will be ways to fix it, without them shafting you in the butt like Tesla did with their ECU eMMC chip failure. I wouldn't count on Today's Tesla being any nicer to fix than tomorrow's Toyota that's for sure.

There's also enough total lost every year that many of the non wear and tear items are salvaged for the rare repair need. Problem is more like how long are cars design for? Will these chips be the one that crush the cars? So far for gas cars it is not, for EV most likely the battery would be and not the ECU.

If this is your problem stay away from Nissan's with a Jatco CVT, I remember reading some end up in the junkyard at 80k miles because the tranny grenaded.

A Prius is basically a throwaway car at the mileage they rack up when they become “affordable” after a cabbie or Uber driver beats on it. A battery pack, brake actuator, head gasket or catalytic converter “totals” them. It’s to Toyota as the Taurus and Crown Vic was to Ford. Except it doesn’t have a ticking timebomb of a transmission(AXOD/AX4S/AX4N) or the mod motor maladies.

 

[nthach]

Also, my parents rented out their first house, a condo. We had section 8 tenants. And it was sad seeing how they lived - dependent on SNAP, welfare and payday loans. I recalled the tenant bought a used Land Rover Discovery, only for their daughter to wreck it and we had the HOA breathe down our neck to tow. I really wanted to tell them to move closer to the two biggest cities that were close by for some semblance of public transit but that happened on its own(moved out before we could evict them for not paying rent). This was some 15 years ago, before the Bay Area started its 2nd and 3rd waves of gentrification.

The car was from a BHPH lot. When me and my dad cleaned up the wreck they left behind, we found countless payday loan receipts and creditor notices.

 

[Passport1]

Perhaps something like this;

 

[ecotourist]

Perhaps something like this;

View attachment 90342

That is exactly what many people drove during the depression in the 1930s. Except the car was an earlier model.

 

[manicrodder]

Perhaps something like this;

View attachment 90342

1 horse power.

 

[eljefino]

When I hear that 60% plus is on food stamps and closer to 70% is receiving some kind of financial aid I can't see electric vehicles in their future . Who knows , just wondering .

They aren't. You are reading biased news which appears to be leading you to fret over exaggerations. The correct percentage of SNAP recipients is 12%.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/food-stamp-benefits-by-state
https://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap

 

[eljefino]

The EV part of it is virtually irrelevant. Cars still have tons of parts that break, that fail, that degrade, that get ugly or faded or cracked.

Batteries degrade. That will be the one discriminator I think. The current situation is that you find some old guzzler or oil burner, but you still have a tank of gas and know how far you can go. I suspect that the “haves” won’t want to put up with an eV that has a fraction of its original range, and half the systems in it failed or failing. These cars will get sold two or three times just like a current vehicle does.

And the poor folks with have a 56 mike range EV with broken air conditioner and wobbly suspension, no different than a jalopy they may drive today.

Lets not forget, all the non power train things that break and fail on cars today, will do so on EVs tomorrow… maybe even more…

A car will be on the road until it ticks its owner off enough for him to dump it.

Some cars do it with occasional, outrageously priced repairs.
Some do it with a Chinese water torture of small, cheap ones.
Some clunk and rattle and drive people crazy with stuff like power windows stuck down. But not as crazy as failing to run.

The car will be resold, more and more cheaply until nobody wants to touch it, then it gets junked. Same as now.

We see luxury marques make it to 300k now. Maybe they're better built, maybe better maintained. Maybe better loved. Maybe the owner wants the most from their "investment."

The poors in Cuba drive some real old stuff, not by choice. If things get that bad here the clever will flourish and the do-it-for-me neversweats will suffer, same as now.

 

[JeffKeryk]

This is a tough question... I don't remember what I drove when I was poor. Other people's beaters I guess. Someone gave me a fairly decent Gremlin once; it had a bad 3 speed manual transmission. Got a junkyard tranny for $75 that I managed to string together. Also had a warped head. Head gaskets and resurface did the trick. I lent it out and it got smashed.
I know I walked a lot. People did help me, though. And I appreciated it a lot. So I like to fix up cars and give them to people in need. Funny, all those people are working and getting by on their own now. Some have achieved great things.

 

[measureman]

Yeah, you were just making an assertion no longer backed up by facts. Very common these days.

Are you saying it's as cheap to repair or maintain a Mercedes as is a Chevy?

 

[Slow Car Sport Mode]

 

[Slow Car Sport Mode]

Orz, if that too rich...

 

[Malo83]

Perhaps something like this;

View attachment 90342

Or this, Keep on Truckin'

 

[Wolf359]

Are you saying it's as cheap to repair or maintain a Mercedes as is a Chevy?

No, didn't say it was as cheap, just that you could probably afford to maintain one but it will be a little more than a Chevy but not like it's 10x more or whatever unaffordable means. There's people here who complain about 8k bills from a Toyota or a Honda so it's hard to say what unaffordable really means.

 

[vw7674]

View attachment 90272

Now that's what I call hiding from the repo man.

 

[PandaBear]

Also, my parents rented out their first house, a condo. We had section 8 tenants. And it was sad seeing how they lived - dependent on SNAP, welfare and payday loans. I recalled the tenant bought a used Land Rover Discovery, only for their daughter to wreck it and we had the HOA breathe down our neck to tow. I really wanted to tell them to move closer to the two biggest cities that were close by for some semblance of public transit but that happened on its own(moved out before we could evict them for not paying rent). This was some 15 years ago, before the Bay Area started its 2nd and 3rd waves of gentrification.

The car was from a BHPH lot. When me and my dad cleaned up the wreck they left behind, we found countless payday loan receipts and creditor notices.

Yeah, section 8 has a huge range between dead beat with full gov payment to people on low income because their career doesn't pay much (like chefs), and then there are people who game the system by working "weekend" only so they can watch their own kids, getting all the freebies, while doing "interesting projects" that does not show up on their 1040s.

I never rented and will never rent to people on full section 8 gov payment. I don't want to deal with in people with "nothing to lose" in life, they can be very hard to work with.

 

[PandaBear]

A Prius is basically a throwaway car at the mileage they rack up when they become “affordable” after a cabbie or Uber driver beats on it. A battery pack, brake actuator, head gasket or catalytic converter “totals” them. It’s to Toyota as the Taurus and Crown Vic was to Ford. Except it doesn’t have a ticking timebomb of a transmission(AXOD/AX4S/AX4N) or the mod motor maladies.

Every car outside of some exotic collectibles eventually becomes a "throwaway" car. It is just a matter of time. Corolla probably has 200k, Taurus about 120k, Prius with the first battery probably about 150k, and if you put another battery on it maybe 250k. When they are not yet "disposable" their used market value reflects that. You get what you pay for and you pay for what you get. I'm sure Prius depreciation reflect that, but people save gas driving it while it depreciates and compensates for its loss in depreciation.

This is how a used 150k Camry is worth way more with a 4 cylinder engine than a V6 engine.

 

[PandaBear]

We see luxury marques make it to 300k now. Maybe they're better built, maybe better maintained. Maybe better loved. Maybe the owner wants the most from their "investment."

Because they share a lot of stuff with cheap cars that make them go 300k now, you can thank Corolla and Camry, hence Lexus, for raising the bar and push the Germans and Americans into this new frontier. Competition is good.