Dear HN crowd: this is not a market opportunity. Not for loans, not for cars. Just … leave it alone. K, thx, bye.
roenxi 50 minutes ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 28 minutes ago [-]
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).
Zambyte 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
cosmic_cheese 10 minutes ago [-]
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.
(Where will those bikes, busses, and trains you mention be built? China, as they are 1/3rd of global manufacturing capacity)
al_borland 2 minutes ago [-]
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.”
toomuchtodo 43 seconds ago [-]
Sure. When will Congress appropriate the funds? They won’t even stop and illegal war.
strangattractor 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
coderenegade 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
3 minutes ago [-]
SoftTalker 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
Zambyte 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
raddan 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
lhamil64 41 minutes ago [-]
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.
mmooss 30 minutes ago [-]
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."
adrianN 10 minutes ago [-]
Most people hate all drivers except themselves.
classictraffic 51 minutes ago [-]
Too late – we're going to see "Show HN" posts of vibe coded apps related to this in 48 hours
SoftTalker 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
SOLAR_FIELDS 9 minutes ago [-]
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.
JackFr 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
bluGill 24 minutes ago [-]
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.
coderenegade 8 minutes ago [-]
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.
djmips 15 minutes ago [-]
Toyota Echo - perhaps the car car ever made.
tech_ken 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
raddan 44 minutes ago [-]
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.
cgio 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
hn993302 13 minutes ago [-]
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.
hn993302 25 minutes ago [-]
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. I hate power windows.
Neywiny 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
Synthetic7346 35 minutes ago [-]
I'm curious about the insurance aspect of this, do people buying $1000 cars forego insurance?
dghlsakjg 24 minutes ago [-]
At that tier you buy minimum coverage liability. That coverage is pretty cheap, but even so, many choose to risk it.
hn993302 29 minutes ago [-]
Supposedly about 20% of drivers in El Paso are uninsured, so yes?
firesteelrain 12 minutes ago [-]
Texas needs to be stricter about this and start suspending licenses
trollbridge 10 minutes ago [-]
Suspending licences doesn't stop people from driving anymore than not having insurance doesn't.
hn993302 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
omgwtfbyobbq 30 minutes ago [-]
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.
hn993302 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
yojo 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
omgwtfbyobbq 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
Dig1t 15 minutes ago [-]
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.
doubleg72 27 minutes ago [-]
They typically carry liability
carabiner 34 minutes ago [-]
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.
miah_ 2 minutes ago [-]
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.
Rendered at 03:02:38 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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).
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.
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)
“A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.”
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.
"When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them."
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.
Maybe cause I was about to get married but I loved that truck.
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.
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.
Unfortunately there's a fair bit if industry built around charging people who are stretched financially more, but it's possible to avoid that.
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.
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.