this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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In my lived experience people are also notoriously bad at analyzing their own needs, a fact car salesmen and marketers take full advantage of.
But you know, it's a cardinal sin to tell someone they don't evaluate need very well. Take my mom and dad,they live together with no kids, semi retired and in 2018 they replaced an SUV with a $55,000+ Ford Mustang. The same year I got a Chevy Bolt for my family of 3, now 4. Fast forward to 2023, they spent the last six years paying higher monthly payments than I did, they can't take the grandkids anywhere because car seats don't fit, they complain about being on fixed income because the price of gas spiked up, they can't take road trips because fuel is too expensive and when I mentioned maybe they should have considered an EV they say "well I don't have a spare sixty thousand dollars around just to save a buck on gas". Anyway, I'm the AH now for having tried to convince them in 2018 that a sports car was not what they needed.
Next story, a married friend of mine bought a large SUV soon after buying a house. It was just the two of them. Asked why get such a big vehicle they said they were renovating the house, and it was easier to use their own vehicle than to get deliveries or rent a truck occasionally. Years after finishing the home one of them is still making payments on that rig, and since they're divorced the only hauling it does is one person to work at great expense.
That is not really a reply to what I wrote, though. I do get the appeal of fast and powerful cars subjectively, but objectively it should be a means to an end and simply tick all the "useful" boxes when making a purchase decision. Because the manufacturers want to earn as much money as they can, they cater to what people "want" because the price tags and margins are bigger. What people want in the US nowadays seems to be huge SUVs, huge pickup trucks (possibly lifted with 24 inch wheels) or other large vehicles that are preferably equipped with supercharged V8 engines and have all the bells and whistles you can fit into a vehicle that weighs 2 tons or more.
Because people are buying cars that suit "their taste" or their imagined "needs", we're looking at an arms race on the roads and most of the efficiency gains of the past decades are eaten by the taste for large, powerful and very comfortable passenger vehicles. People may want a fully kitted Escalade, while a Smart car would do the trick for the grocery run or daily commute.
Ya gotta excuse the Mom and Dad. While I don’t know what they are like, so many of us spend our whole adult lives doing the mature thing, or doing everything for the kids. Yes, I can understand the urge to live a little, splurge a little, if they’re a little ahead. I’m picturing that Mustang as a lifelong dream that they always put off in favor of something practical