I was looking and the number of vehicles with 300,000km asking over 10k and sometimes over 20k was like "what?"

Then I looked at the price of new vehicles and it was like "holy shit...."

I think it all goes back to 2008 in two ways

First, cash for clunkers meant that they took a bunch of viable low end used vehicles and destroyed them. I've been thinking lately about that phrase "the wealth of nations" and I can't help but think that part of that wealth is the accumulated stuff that has already been manufactured and just needs to be maintained. A bunch of used cars on the road might not seem like a big deal, but those are all tools that somebody can go out and use to make their life better. Destruction of those tools is the destruction of the wealth of the nation, even if they aren't wonderful luxury cars that everyone wants to be driving around in.

The way that the government burecrats focus on GDP can be easily refuted. Think about a scenario where your grandfather bequeathed to you a piece of land. The land was completely undeveloped, had nothing on it. You chop down some trees on it, and with artisanal skill alone build a house on that property. Then you pass it off to your kids, and they have built up even greater artisanal skill and so they keep the household there, but dig up rock and build a giant castle, a mansion made out of stone. And maybe the quarry on your property that they used to get the stone for the castle it turns into a fine little lake, and a generation or two later, the same family is living there, maybe they are planning food and living off that food, and maybe some eagles dropped some fish into the lake and they spawned and now you can fish in that lake, and you have a property with a house and a castle and some farmland and lake, that was nothing before. What is the GDP of this piece of land? Well the answer is zero. In spite of the fact that it went from being a completely undeveloped piece of land to a highly developed piece of land no money ever changed hands and so the GDP is zero. Now would you say that that family with a GDP of zero has less wealth than a family renting an apartment in the ghetto? The family in the ghetto likely has a GDP of several thousand dollars, maybe $20,000 maybe more, money is coming in and going out, so according to the economist the family with the castle is doing terribly and the family in the ghetto is much richer. But who would choose to live in the ghetto when they could choose to live in the castle?

Second thing that 2008 did is driving interest rates down to basically nothing. That's why people are willing to take out 84 months loans on a car, because it's 84 months at basically no interest. Let's see if people are quite so excited to take on such a commitment with 10% annual interest rates, or 20%. The availability of money made it easier to borrow more, and made it easier to borrow longer. As a result every shit box suddenly became a lot more expensive.

I didn't realize how bad it was in North America until someone showed me some of the used car market in europe. You can still get a shitbox car for a thousand Euros there. The sort of thing you'd brag about driving? Probably not. But it's Wheels, and that can change a lot...