"I can't give this thing away."
FTA: He's not trying to give it away. He's expecting last year's used market value for it, but it's steadily depreciating. Someone offered him 50k for it. He overpaid for a new car.
There is a Tesla dealership near my house that has a lot full of them. A ridiculous number. It seems that Tesla is struggling to get rid of them. Hard to believe that there is not a huge market for electric dumpsters sold by a conspicuous asshole.
from the tardygrade's perspective is it playing a large violin or a normal-sized cello?
Nah, that's a cello, a viola just looks like a violin and plays like one, the difference in size is so small you probably won't notice unless they're sitting next to each other... The cello is played like in the picture and has a body that's noticably thicker than a violin or viola even if they were all scaled to the same size
Edit: you know what, on looking closer, I'm not 100% sure that is actually cello thick, but it's been a long time since I've seen them in person on a regular basis
https://hub.yamaha.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Violin-and-Viola-Sizing-for-Blog.jpg
Thinks cello's are too big for the one that microscopic buttworm has, which is why I thought of viola, which sits right between viola and violin. Didn't know they weren't played like cellos. Have never really paid attention to Viola's much.
I've only heard what they sound like and I feel like they're the redheaded step child of the string instruments. Who exactly likes this sound? Bass gives a deep sound for F clef and more somber tones, Celo provides a rich highly dynamic tone that can deliver low tones but also beautiful melodies, and the violin is the violin. With the viola, you're what exactly do you do here? The motherfucking recorder of the violin family.
Are your hands too big for the violin and you simply hate the beauty of the cello? Do you like shitty tones? Are you perma-drunk? Rhythm instrument in Bass not for you? Well, I've got just the inbred idiot for you.
One major issue for Sledder here is that since Tesla started Cybertruck deliveries, the starting price for his vehicle has significantly fallen...That further lowers the starting price to $70,500.
My man found out the hard way about depreciation. All my life people have said never to buy a new car because it loses 20% of its value the moment you drive it off the lot. If you really want to drive new cars the best way to do it is lease and change every couple of years (this is still not financially sound, just better than buying new).
cars are kind of a scam
The sadder scam is that most advertisements about car are like this https://youtu.be/KIvC5wsoW2Y (literally the 1st video I found) namely :
- you are alone on the road (even in a city center here!)
- you are driving in gorgeous scenery (here city without any ads or trash, country side, parks, above empty bridges, etc)
- you are smiling while driving
Whereas the reality is, for the vast majority of people (I'd wager 99%), you will drive bumper to bumper for hours to go from home to work then work to home in polluted cities, going through rings roads, stopping are red lights, etc.
Cars are a scam in so many ways but IMHO the worst one is the promise of pleasure while driving.
Reminds me that someone posted a 1950s "the future of travel" video, and it was all retro futuristic cars doing 200 mph on almost totally empty highways.
I get pleasure on my commute. I'm on the edge of a metro area and so is my job. I can sit in traffic for 30 minutes driving straight there or I can drive a little further out and around and drive country roads for 30 minutes. It's more distance but I love that drive.
The more expensive the car the higher the percentage lost by driving off the lot, I think
What's the best used electric car?
I'm afraid that logic doesn't translate because batteries don't last 300,000 miles like the engine on a good ICE Toyota.
Batteries do last 300,000 miles. They might give only around 80-85% of their original range, but they are still very usable vehicles. Again this also depends on the reliability of the manufacturer and on the how the user has maintained the vehicle.
Just like how a shitty hyundai engines from back in the day would not last 300,000 miles, poorly managed batteries (like in the older generation nissan leafs) will also not last that long.
I just went into an electric motorcycle shop here in my country, and I was told the battery would need to be replaced every 3 years.
Most electric vehicles that ive found will not last 300,000 miles. Worse, I can't figure out which will last and which won't last.
Motorcycles batteries won't last as long as car batteries. The main reason being motorcycles (at least in the west) are designed to be high performance, fun to ride machines. Smaller batteries (because motorcycles don't have much space) combined with higher discharge rates (because they are being driven fast for fun) means more cycles on the battery.
For comparison, I drive a moped/e-scooter that is has been tuned for slow, local rides. That thing comes with a 7 year, 80000 km warranty on the battery so the manufacturer thinks the battery will last at least that long before hitting 70% SoH.
Most electric vehicles that ive found will not last 300,000 miles. Worse, I can't figure out which will last and which won't last.
Modern 4 wheeled EVs (mainly cars) should last that long. Bikes/motorcycles will not and frankly, I have never seen a motorcycle or moped (ICE or EV) last for nearly 500,000 km on the original powertrain.
No one will buy a used car for more than they can get a new one. Who knew?
Between price drops and the cybertruck recently qualifying for the federal EV tax credit, buyers can get a brand new unit for what this guy is asking. This early adopter paid too much and got a bad deal, but there's no mystery as to why no one wants to buy at his asking price.
That one is not as bad looking as the rest but it still screams 3rd grade art project
Remember? The value of an item is what you get paid for, not what you want to get from it.
Expensive lesson, try not being a sucker next time.
"Oh no my shitty car depreciated" god who would have guessed
All of a sudden I don’t feel like the stupidest person for having my passport stolen and missing my flight.
Ooof sorry to hear that. Any chance of getting it back? Sometimes people take the money but return the IDs / passport to wherever was closest.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to concern anyone with my absent mindedness. I filed a police report and the police did examine the cameras and confirmed the theft but I didn’t choose to prosecute. I already made arrangements with the embassy to get a temporary pass and travel back home next week.
All’s well that ends well.
If analyzed in purelly financial terms, buying a brand new car is almost invariably one of the worst investments there is compared to other options (if you really need a car, aim for a car which is 1 or 2 years), and if you couple that with taking a punt on a Musk product on the user side (not even the shareholders' side but quite literally the side of the people the shareholders, most noteably Musk, want to extract money from, so pretty much the suckers' side) AND, maybe worse, doing it as an early adopter, pretty much adds up to a guaranteed lubless shafting.
Investing in a "I'm a sucker" tattoo for one's forehead probably has a better return.
buying a brand new car is almost invariably one of the worst investments
Because it's not an investment. There is nothing wrong with buying a new car if you plan on keeping it. You get the original manufacturer's warranty, no worries about a previous owner having been in an accident or not keeping up with routine maintenance, and often times you can lower your initial cost of ownership via dealer financing that's below market rates because they're willing to take loses there to move vehicles. Just a quick look, 2022 Toyota Corolla SE with 33k miles is selling for roughly ~$23k. A brand new 2025 Corolla SE is selling for ~$26k. If you need to finance it, you're going to get better rates on the new vehicle vs the used. You're getting 3 years worth of improvements and you're getting a full manufacturer's warranty and not just the balance of what's outstanding on a 3 year old vehicle with 33k miles on it.
Almost every purchase for oneself is an investment, not in the Financial Investment sense of putting money expecting to get more money out but in the broader sense that we buy things because they provide some kind of value to us, which can be a utility value, tge satisfaction of an actual physical need, the pleasure one derive from using it or even just the pleasure of owning it
People don't just buy things with no reason at all at any level, though often people buy things for the emotional reason that it gives them a jolt of pleasure to buy that thing (not exactly the smartest thing to do IMHO, but quite possibly one of the core pillars holding up present day Consumer Society).
So in that broader sense even the peace of mind you refer to as a justification for buying a new car has an actual value which can be expressed into a rough money range or, even better, the more personal "how long do I have to work to pay for the peace of mind of a new car instead of buying a 2 year old car".
Further once you look at it that way, you start identifying which objective/need/feeling you're trying to satisfy and figuring out other ways of satisfying it for less - for example if a car is expensive enough you can literally pay to have many possible used cars you are considering checked by a mechanic before you buy, have car histories checked, and buy an extended warranty, to get that piece mind you wish and still save up a lot of money (or, in another "currency", a lot of days of work to earn that money).
In that broader sense, IMHO, new cars are generally a bad "investment" versus cars with a year or two because you're paying a huge premium for a piece of mind you might get for much cheaper or might not even need because your fears are just be the product of being widely misinformed about the probability of problems in cars relative (I can tell you from a broader Engineering sense, the rates of problem in physical products in general tend to peak first when they're new, then go down, then start going up again when they're aged, which for something like a car would be 5+ year at least, though beware that I only know this rule as a general thing and don't have car-specific knowledge on it beyond some vaguely remembered stuff I read over a decade ago) and of imagining the worst possible scenario in your mind about what problems a 2 year old used car can give you when the reality is that scenario in your mind is incredibly unlikely and you can buy stupidly cheap insurance to cover it.
In that broader sense, IMHO, new cars are generally a bad “investment” versus cars with a year or two because you’re paying a huge premium
That's where I disagree with you though. There isn't a huge premium vs a car that's a year or two old. If you're financing too, it could be more costly to buy a used car as you'd be paying higher rates on the financing. I agree with the sentiment that buying a used car is better but not one that's just a year or two older. People have long been preaching that buying used is better than buying new and as a result, a lot of prices have crept up to the point that its less beneficial to buy used these days. COVID jacked up prices too and while they've gotten better on used cars, they still haven't fully recovered.
That's a good point on the financing side: a used car with about a year or two is well worth it if you have the funds to pay it outright without financing, but if you have to arrange financing yourself you're not going to get as good rates as what the car makers can achieve thank to their bulk deals with Financial Institutions for the financing, which together with other factors (such as, as you pointed out, some cars not falling as much in price from new to used) might wipe out most of the benefit, at which point the difference might just be small enough that it's worth the "peace of mind" value one gets from buying new.
My point is that just going direct for a new car without at least doing some legwork and seriously investigating second hand options is a bad move, since the cost of a car in terms of "how long do I have to work to pay for it" is pretty high for most people and thus its well worth it to spend many hours of one's time doing some researching and evaluating before buying rather than going to the option that's the most heavily pushed in advertising, because for such an expensive purchase even 10% price savings will quite likely well exceed the value of those hours (and the easiest thing to figure out upfront and with little time investment nowadays is if the used car market for the vehicles one is interested in is expensive and close to brand new prices or not, so one can quickly ditch "second hand" as an option if it turns out the market is pricing it too high).
Personally I haven't bough a new car in more than a decade (I ditched my middle-age-crisis-mobile some years ago and switched to cycling and walking, but then again I've been living in urban areas in Europe so a car is not required and generally more of a hassle and money sink than anything else), but a year ago my dad got a great deal on a small second hand city car which was less than two years old (so it even had some manufacturer warranty time in it) which saved him a pretty penny, though that was in Portugal rather than the US.
My point is that just going direct for a new car without at least doing some legwork and seriously investigating second hand options is a bad move
100% agreed there.
