When the average car still on American roads today left the dealership, you couldn’t go very far without hearing “Rolling in the Deep” playing on someone’s stereo. I’m not saying that song’s not a banger—it is, certifiably—but it’s been a while since it was a fresh jam. But the cars from that time still keep putting in the work today; a new study shows Americans have hit a record average high with vehicle ownership. Can you blame us?
We have that trend for today’s morning roundup, plus more news about VinFast and where Alfa Romeo is hinging its comeback plans. Happy Monday; let’s get started.
The Cars Are Getting Old
If you drive a Ford F-150, Toyota Camry, Chevy Silverado or Nissan Altima from 2010 or 2011, congratulations: you’re basically driving the average car on American roads today. S&P Global Mobility released another study that shows how old today’s cars are, and according to them, it’s 12.5 years — up from 12.2 years in 2022.
Here’s a handy chart from those folks that shows just how much cars on the road have aged in the past two decades:
You can see where things started to level off in the years after the Great Recession and the auto industry’s (in some cases, state-funded) recovery, wherein car buyers found relief from pent-up demand. But now people are keeping their cars on the road longer than ever; especially passenger cars, which are spending a whopping 13.6 years in service, on average.
Is anyone surprised by this? Modern cars are safer, faster, more reliable, better built and more efficient than at any other point in history. Sure, some brands and vehicle types hold their long-term quality better than others and there are still a few maintenance disasters out there. But on the whole, if you buy a car today (or in 2010, apparently) and take care of it, you can keep it running for a very long time.
Couple those technology improvements with the fact that new cars are staggeringly expensive, a trend we’ve been covering extensively here at The Autopian. Rising interest rates, longest-ever loan terms, an uncertain economy ahead, a market-wide shift to trucks and SUVs and still-pricey electric vehicles all mean more and more people are saying “Yeah, this is fine for now” when they think about their aging cars. When the average new car price is trending toward $50,000, that old Altima seems quite appealing.
As Axios notes today, even if we’re on the eve of what appears to be an eventually all-electric new car market—something I too believe, with emphasis on “eventually”—this data proves gasoline cars aren’t going anywhere for a while. And I don’t even mean new cars. I mean the ones on the road now. Those vehicles will all be creating emissions for decades to come, which is worrisome from a climate perspective.
Then again, what the hell are people supposed to do, right? Automakers are kind of banking on super-high transaction prices to help bankroll the EV transition, but not every American driver wants to—or even can—help them pay that tab. New cars have gotten so outrageously expensive that many of us have no choice but to keep our older vehicles running until they simply cannot anymore.
VinFast Tries For A VinSPAC
In the decade I’ve been covering the auto industry, I honestly can’t remember a new car launch as universally despised by reviewers as the VinFast VF8. Our take was “Just don’t;” others said “Simply Unacceptable,” “Return To Sender,” or simply “Yikes.” It’s like that one review of a Spinal Tap album that was just “shit sandwich.” This was the kind of revilement that happened to cars like the Yugo, way back in the day.
To be fair, a VinFast VF8 is a better car than a Yugo is. (I think.) But as we see with the above data, today’s cars have gotten much better than they were in decades past. Even if VinFast put in a noble effort as a brand new car from a new company and a country relatively new to automating, it’s simply not enough to cut it right now. And I’m not sure if American buyers will give it the patience they once gave newcomers like Volkswagen, Toyota and Hyundai, especially since those brands used to represent a super-cheap value proposition; the $50,000 VF8 certainly does not.
(Side note: What if this car had been like, $24,000? I think that would’ve changed a lot of people’s tunes.)
But capitalism gonna capitalism. And so VinFast is now a publicly traded company in the U.S., doing so via a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company. (This piece I ran at The Drive two years ago explains how they work.) SPACs had a big moment in 2020 and 2021, but the vast majority of them fizzled out hard and they’ve since become something of a joke on Wall Street.
Bloomberg’s here to explain why this SPAC is also a dicey one, which is fitting for VinFast:
The purported $27 billion valuation (which includes debt) would make it the third-largest such transaction in history.
However, the merger of VinFast Auto Pte. Ltd. with Hong Kong-based Black Spade Acquisition Co. announced Friday feels more like an act of desperation than a revival of a maligned asset class. The transaction won’t raise much money and the purported valuation looks as rocky as VinFast’s US vehicles.
[…] VinFast filed for a regular US initial public offering in December, but last week announced it would go public via the SPAC route, without explaining its change of heart. Of course it’s hard for anyone to do an IPO at the moment, but the company’s recent news hasn’t been encouraging: Its initial US vehicle deliveries were delayed, it cut part of its US workforce and it tapped Vuong and related entities for $2.5 billion.
It’s normal to be skeptical of the long-term prospects of EV startups. Tesla’s the standard bearer but it took the vast majority of its 20 years in existence to get to a stable, profitable stage. But even troubled companies like Lucid and Rivian have promising, cutting-edge products; based on everything so far we cannot say the same about VinFast.
What it does have is Vietnamese billionaire founder Pham Nhat Vuong, but even he’s not going to waste his fortune on cars forever if they don’t pan out.
The Tonale To Be A Shot In The Arm For Alfa Romeo
Alfa Romeo’s another one of those “What the hell happened?” brands. A decade ago, it announced aggressive product plans with an Italian BMW-esque full lineup and hinged its hopes on a big relaunch in America. None of that stuff panned out. The Giulia sedan got a lot of early hype, especially in Quadrifoglio form, but it came out just in time for everyone to pivot to buying SUVs. The Stelvio’s launch took too long to happen, and the 4C was never meant to be a volume seller. After years of hype in the 2010s, it all just fizzled out. Fiat Chrysler’s transformation into Stellantis probably didn’t help much either.
So now, all hopes ride on the Tonale: a compact crossover with an un-Alfa-like plug-in hybrid 1.3-liter turbo four and a starting price around $45,000. I haven’t driven one yet but apparently, it’s fine.
What you can expect is a big marketing blitz in America, according to Automotive News:
[…] The next focuses on enticing new customers. Alfa Romeo formulated a profile of potential buyers that it dubs “Sydney.” Sydney is a 35-year-old man or woman, making around $135,000 per year, unmarried but in a committed relationship, and living in a thriving metro area. This person has a passion for the arts, culture and the health of the planet, Goldstein said.
Alfa’s mostly hoping for younger, professional women buyers on this one, but even it admits it’s playing in an unfamiliar space with a compact hybrid crossover. My advice to Alfa is to make sure they have the reliability dialed in this time. That didn’t help the Guilia and Stelvio’s prospects at all a few years ago.
Can Tesla Hit Reset On Car Manufacturing?
The next big thing to watch out of Tesla may not be new car models (though I maintain it desperately needs those too) but how cars are made entirely. All eyes are on the “unboxed” manufacturing process Elon Musk announced at the Phase 3 event earlier this year, reports Reuters. It basically means breaking the car up into subassemblies and then putting them together down the line, which is said to be key to Tesla’s sub-Model 3 pricing goals. (I found a good explainer here and I hope we’ll dive more into this later.)
Here’s Reuters on why this could be a big deal, potentially:
Officials said the unboxed process could cut production costs in half and reduce the factory footprint by 40%. The aim, said the company, is to “build more vehicles at lower cost.”
The assemblage of new techniques will not be fully tested until the system is installed in late 2024 at Tesla’s new $5 billion plant in Monterrey, Mexico, where the company plans to build a new generation of sub-$30,000 EVs.
[…] Martin French, managing director at consulting firm Berylls which focuses on the industry’s rapid shift to electric and smart mobility, wondered if Tesla’s move might supplant decades-old lean manufacturing methods pioneered by industry kingpin Toyota Motor Corp (7203.T).
“I got the feeling when I watched the Tesla (presentation) that the Toyota Production System handbook has just been thrown up in the air and machine-gunned down,” French said.
German researcher Jan-Philipp Büchler of the Free University of Dortmund, believes Tesla’s new process is “revolutionary,” adding: “This is much more than modular production … It’s eliminating steps that were standard, creating new patterns of working, increasing speed, reducing complexity.”
It could change how cars are made globally. But other experts say it depends on exact synchronization, which Toyota mastered with its Just In Time system, and it may be ill-suited to making different sizes and types of cars instead of just one.
Your Turn
What’s the longest you’ve ever kept a car you’ve owned? My first car was a Toyota Corolla (not exciting, but it got the job done, no questions asked) and I had it for eight years before trading it for a Subaru WRX because I was young and got a real job and wanted to go fast.
My current daily driver is a 2018 Mazda 3 hatchback. I just put 50,000 miles on it and it’s in stellar shape. It’s also completely paid off. I am not getting rid of that anytime soon, even if my next “new” car is an EV or a PHEV. Count my Mazda in that S&P Global study in about 10 years.
The longest I’ve ever kept a car was a little over eight years, a 1991 Mazda Miata that I bought with 200,000 miles on it already. I put another 40,000 on it. I had a very short commute at the time, and usually had a winter car to supplement it.
I’ve had my MG for almoat seven years now, and my truck for four. The Chrysler I inherited from my dad is only ten years old. I can see those three vehicles sticking around a good decade or so.
I bought an 06 Tucson in 2005 and drove it for 210,000 miles and 13 years. I would have kept it longer but it started falling apart and repairs became more than monthly car payments so I bought an Elantra in 2018 that I’m hoping to get to 200,000 miles on too. Although if they ever announce an AWD Maverick PHEV I will order it day one and wave goodbye to my sedan.
If Ford ever announces a AWD PHEV Maverick, it will most likely be even more rare than the current hybrid with a delivery time measured in epochs.
I’m still rocking a 2006 GMC Sierra I bought brand new 17 years ago next week. I’ll never sell it. The price of new trucks makes me choke, plus I hate how stupidly tall they’ve gotten.
Last fall a buddy sold me a ’99 Corolla For $200 that has basically nothing wrong with that. I’ve been putting a lot of my puttering around town miles on that since I got it. I’m doing my best to drive that average vehicle age up!
Elon will find a way to fuck up the production process.
At one point I realized I’d owned 10 new cars in roughly 10 years… needless to say, that was a series increasingly poor financial decisions so I then traded for a 2006 Civic Coupe and managed to drive that for 7 years, at which point I lost my mind and started my old habits again. Fortunately that only lasted about 5 years and 5 cars, but I’ve now had my current Jeep for 4 years and I’ve no plans to get rid of it soon, plus I added a used 2016 Focus which turned out to be a surprisingly great car.
With new car prices what they are, the only thing I might consider in a couple of years is trading for a used ’23 Prius Prime.
I bought “BUF” a 1974 Chevy 3/4 ton flat bed in 1995. He had 150k on the original drive train and ran great. Now it is 2023 and BUF is going strong with a bit over 375K and still running the original drive train. I’ve replaced the clutch twice, the brakes once and a front end rebuild at about 250K. The 350 V8 has never been out of the truck. Ditto for the trans and rear end. Incidental maintenance has been limited to normal wear items.
What is/was the secret? Its first 150K was done running propane. When I bought the truck the previous owner kept the propane system for his new truck. I have changed all fluids on a regular basis including oil changes every 5K miles. That’s all!
Needless to say, BUF is a keeper.
I have a 2014 Kia that I bought new in 2014 (only new car ever bought)
My Dad had a 67 MGB he bought new and gave it to me in 1981, and I’d still have it if it weren’t for a drunk driver rear ending it. I want a new car now, but not at these prices. I guess I’ll wait for the recession to hit and OEMs are throwing money on the hood.
My father bought a new Austin-Healey 3000 in 1960. He stopped driving it circa 1988 (after >500,000 miles), at which time I took it over. Circumstances forced me to sell it in 2001. Biggest mistake of my life. I’m told it has now been restored. It should be good for at least another 41 years.
I too would take a Yugo over a VinFast. “Cheap” is one thing; “pitifully engineered” is something else altogether. I can reattach most parts when they fall off, or replace them when they break, but I doubt I could begin to trace all issues alluded to in the VF reports I’ve seen. They may, if fact, be beyond ANY mortal’s abilities.
I have my doubts about the “unboxed” method. Unless the interior is injection molded in one piece (like a hotel room I once stayed in in Tokyo), it will still require laborers to screw the subassembly together before it meets the rest of the car. Perhaps eventually it will happen, and cars will be snapped together like Tonka Toys, but it seems that will require compromises to individual parts that customers won’t like.
At 45, longest I ever owned a car was 3 years. I bought 1 new car, a 99 Neon 5 spd. ( loved it ) Seems like I am getting close to having to find a forever car. I would say the average age of car I buy is about 10 years old when I get them.
We tend to hold onto cars for a long time and only sell after we wear them out. Selling at 250k is normal for us. Our current stable of cars were built in ’64, ’67, ’91, ’20, ’22, averaging out to 30.2 years. The ’64 has been in the family since ’65, I’ve owned the ’67 since ’78. Far from normal!
14 years for my Fit. And I plan to keep it as long as possible, since it’s a no frills or complications Honda in a non-salting area.
I might have been tempted to get a new car since I can afford one… but there are no small and reliable hatchbacks anymore. I don’t want an oversized pickup or a super generic and overpriced crossover, so apparently am not a worthwhile customer.
We handed off our 2011 Fit to our daughter and it’s still running well. In my opinion the Honda Fit is one of the all-time great cars. In auto guise it’s not as perky as I would like (boo on Honda for never doing a Fit Si or I’d be driving one today), but the reliability and practicality of the car has been unbeatable.
Fits were nothing special on paper. To own one was to really appreciate them. Though I never owned one, I drove some for a week or three at a time. Though not great on fast TX highways, they were quite good in urban and suburban driving. Ah, the joy of driving a simple car with a great stick shift.
Nine years on mine, the only car I bought new (my 3rd car…I lived in Manhattan for 35 years). I adore it, it’s exactly what I wanted, and there is nothing on the market to replace it. I’m at 70K miles, and I’m 68. Hope to keep it until I’m done driving.
https://preview.netcarshow.com/Honda-Fit-2015-800-31.jpg
’01 Volvo V70 T5 Manual. 257k. Still an everyday, fun to drive, engaging highway rocket that *can* get 30 mpg combined. And haul everything. And tow. And let you sleep in it. Still has modern airbags (drivers bag renewed with the recall) incl rear side impact and seat airbags for the kids, crumple zones, and even traction control if that’s your thing. I plan to eclipse the 300k mark next year.
I Imagine my 16-yo self in ’96 seeing any car assembled 23 years earlier, and how i would have recoiled at the malaisey-meh Fe2O3 cages we were subjected to in the rust belt. No thank you. Cars are so incredibly reliable now compared to what we used to be subjected to. Despite being a 3-owner car from upstate NY, this car has zero rust, and they pretty much are all like that, i’ve had 8 of them. Dont tell your friends, they’ll want to buy one and drive up the used P2 prices, ha.
My DD is 98, I have been driving it for 42 of those years. It was built to last.
You daily drive something from 1925?
If serious and not trolling, this is worthy of a post of its own.
The longest I’ve kept a car a daily driven car is 11 years though I’ve kept project cars around longer than that due to procrastination. Most of my car purchases haven’t been due to trading up however but seem to have more to do with the frequency of major flooding events in Houston. My wife and I are currently both driving 6yo cars because Hurricane Harvey visited town 6 years ago.
Maybe those cars 5 to 10 years old are “more reliable, better built” than they used to be, but…..I’ve been in a brand new loaner for about 2 months and I’ve not seen so many issues since my 1st model year Acura TSX (was in the first 1500 built). Rough molded plastic panels, door locks that don’t unlock, clips/tabs breaking off, having to pump brakes to get it to start, tires out of balance and push button shifter that doesn’t always register pushes, sometimes jarring starts from a stop (due to start/stop system) to name a few issues. This from what is considered a good Japanese manufacturer.
The pandemic has really hurt quality, in addition to quantity.
Oh to have a car again like my wife’s ’04 Accord. It wasn’t fast, flashy or ‘well equipped’, but it just did stuff well enough and was low maintenance.
“Oh to have a car again like my wife’s ’04 Accord. It wasn’t fast, flashy or ‘well equipped’, but it just did stuff well enough and was low maintenance.”
So get one! I dunno about where you live but I see a good selection of older Accords on my local SFBA CL for cheap. Just stick with the 4cyl rather than the 6cyl. The latter is nose heavy and the timing belt will be long overdue for replacement.
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/cto/d/holt-2005-honda-accord-runs-drives/7619031464.html
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/eby/cto/d/oakland-2004-honda-accord/7620189365.html
https://sfbay.craigslist.org/sby/cto/d/san-jose-honda-accord-2007-lx/7618114866.html
Thx for the links, but I guess I meant to say is to have a new/newer production car that was built with the same solid engineering, strait-forward LX trims, reasonable price and quality that Honda used to produce when they really wanted to.
My great-grandfather (he’s 101 years old and still alive, I know, I barely believe it either) has a 2005 Accord with the 3.0 liter V6. Highest trim level, garage parked, 61,000 miles currently. It’s so good that I could never imagine buying one with the four-cylinder.
It makes 240 horsepower all at the top end like Honda engines from back then used to. The 5 speed auto hesitates and lurches a bit when shifting between P/R/D, but when you floor it to pass someone, that sweet 3.0 revs towards redline as smooth as a turbine. Honestly, it’s no Holy Grail, but it’s a damn shame Honda doesn’t make engines like this anymore. My great-grandfather likes it more than the 2009 Cadillac CTS he used to have.
My DD is five years old and has about 36,000 miles on it. I like it a lot and plan to hang on to it as long as possible (knock on wood). Unless my circumstances change, a BEV wouldn’t be a viable option for the next vehicle but a PHEV could work.
Side note: PG, are you guys still planning to rename this section? I don’t recall hearing anything about that for a while. You could use “The Morning Drop”: it would still communicate the nature of the feature (release of something new = a drop) while removing the scatological association. ‘Drop’ even has four letters, same as in the current title, so you wouldn’t need to do much work in the graphics department.
And why would we want that? The Morning Dump (and The Flush R.I.P.) is hilarious.
Not to a great many potential readers who are going to be immediately turned off by the title of the series.
12.5 years with my Cruze Eco. I paid $20k OTD for it back then. That’s about $27k now according to teh interballs.
VinFast’s issues seem like they can be overcome. The software issues can be dealt with in an update. The suspension tuning will need the touch of someone skilled in the dark arts of that trade. But it can be sorted. If they cared to.
I haven’t had a car that long since I am 33 years old and my first purchase was when I was almost 24 years old. But my parents kept a 1999 Nissan Altima for 12 years, best car purchase, nothing went bad in that thing. The good old days from Nissan, no BAE (Big Altima Energy) lol
17 years and still going with my 2006 Mini Cooper S hatchback.
10 years is the longest I have owned it. Been in the family and the current caretaker, 25 years.
21 years on a 94 Toyota truck. Still ran great, but rust killed it.
At some point, enthusiast doomsayers will need to start to face reality re: modern car reliability and longevity.
By 2010, the trope of “modern electronics will make cars unreliable because such and such part is unserviceable” was already in full swing. And yet, here we are with yet another record age for the fleet.
I admit to some of this as well, because I assumed that downsized turbo engines and hybrids would suffer in the reliability department as well. And they don’t seem to have, at least at an industry-wide level.
The same thing is repeating itself in comment sections everywhere, with regard to large screens. I think history shows us we should be very cautious before assuming a backwards jump in reliability/durability.
The longest I’ve kept a car from new is my Viper, almost 8 years. Since I have no plans to get rid of it and rust will never touch it, I expect it to always be my longest.
The thing is that you can still get parts for most 2010 cars because they’re only a few years out from the required 10 year window. How are they going to be at 20 or 25 years (which I think is where the enthusiast market really starts to take over)? I know some of the electronics in the early C5 Corvettes are already nigh-irreplaceable because they aren’t made anymore and they fail just often enough to have exhausted the NOS market. Better hope you can find one from a salvage yard.
That said, for the popular stuff there are actually repair services that have popped up for some so-called unserviceable parts because it’s so expensive to replace them. If you’re looking at $1000+ for a new infotainment screen, $500 to repair your old one doesn’t sound so bad.
There is no 10 year requirement, that is a myth.
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2020/08/03/ask-a-hemmings-editor-how-long-do-carmakers-have-to-provide-replacement-parts-for-older-cars
Regardless, the average age of 12.5 implies a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road already.
Interesting. TIL.
Still, 20 year old cars today predate a lot of the computer stuff that people are concerned about. Screens were uncommon in 2003, and cars that had them from around that time are definitely prone to having issues with them. One of the examples I was thinking of where repair services have popped up is the screens in gen 2 Priuses. They’re prone to dying at this point in their life and basically impossible to get new, so if you can repair one it tends to make sense. If you can’t you get to throw the dice on one pulled from a wrecked car and hope it doesn’t die the same way your old one did. And that’s from a Toyota. I can’t imagine what 20 year old VW screens are like.
I’m just a little skeptical about the true long term reliability of turbo DI engines. They don’t have to be time bombs, but it seems that the manufacturer has to really get EVERYTHING perfect. Check out those Ford 1.5L Ecoboost grenades. Years 10 thru 20 should really tell the tale.
100% with you on the electronics, though. Electronics are the only true maintenance free parts in a car.
in some instances this is true. the wire harness for a 2005 to 2008 Chrysler 300 is not available new, you might find one on Evil Bay, but still it is a crap shoot. I feel like many of the orphans are getting similar treatment.
Hybrids from 2010 do not have the the same resale value as the ICE only counterparts because the hybrid batteries are pricy and almost always toast inside of 10 years. that is of course if the ICE motor is one of the “good” ones. Ecoboost 4’s and the steam passage issue means head gasket concerns at 80K. if not dealt with cracked cylinder linings are a concern. LS GM from 2010 on are a crap shoot considering all of the failure due to the lifter failures in the AFM/DFM set up. Pretty much any Turbo BMW is complete garbage by 2010. Big Diesels which used to be long term reliable are now eating their own lunch because of EGR and Regen issues. not to mention the lovely ford 6.0 and 6.4 design flaws. How about the VW 2.0 TSI. let’s ask Torch how much he thinks those are reliable? it is not necessarily about electronics and turbos that are unreliable, it is more and more about poorly design product with planned obsolescence. The cars making this list are the ones that 5 years ago might have been scrapped, but due the rising cost of cars and even used cars the cost to repair them at home has caused them to be retained a bit longer than before.
Gen X BTW
Mrs Clutch’s Escape is currently at the dealer getting it’s third 1.5L ecoboost engine in 60k miles. The second engine only lasted 4k, at it was the revised block.
the car I just sold I had for 11 years. It is 13 years old. Our other car we’ve had for 13 years. It is 15 years old. So I guess we’re average.
Fun fact. The car I just sold for $5k. I bought it for $17k in cash 11 years ago. That’s a total depreciation cost of $12k over 11 years. Most new cars will depreciate that much in their first year today. It’s painful to buy a new car right now.
Depreciation really depends on what you buy. Something Korean or German? Yeah, probably a lot I would guess. Something in demand and hella reliable long-term? Those hold their value much better. My 2022 Camry Hybrid (bought last year) has 20k miles already, and it’s depreciated barely $1000 on KBB.
I think the longest I have held onto a car was about 8 years. I think I’ve done that a couple times. That said, a couple of them were traded within my family, and we owned those more like 12 years among us.
So I used to have a problem with the used cars, doing the 5 year deal, then trading in before that was done, so longest we’ve owned was probably our F150 we had for about 8 years but it started rusting out(New England road brine). Got it used so really it only lasted about 12 years total, new ones are aluminum so that’s not as bad an issue.