Everyone wants a car! Cars are still expensive! Shouldn’t a company like CarMax suddenly be doing better? Nope! A massive, national used car retailer like CarMax is a reflection of the larger market and where we are, so let’s dive into that a little bit this Friday while we wait for the pivotal baseball games to start.
I probably should have been an economist, because this stuff gets me really excited. I don’t even need coffee. Just give me CarMax’s second-quarter filings. [Ed Note: Matt, you might want to get that checked out by a medical professional. -DT].
Oh, yeah, The Morning Dump (Suck it PG!). It’s more than one story. Let’s also talk about Tesla, because Tesla is in the news for very bad labor reasons. And then maybe I’ll touch on the UAW, as we head for more strikes. Then, what the hell, let’s talk about Britain.
The CarMax Squeeze Is Bad/Good News
Here’s the topline from CarMax: It’s not terrible, but it’s not great, which is reflected in yesterday’s big drop in stock price (the biggest so far this year).
Net revenues were down $7.1 billion, or about 13.1% compared with the same quarter a year ago. Retail sales were down 7.4% and net earnings were also down. What’s going on?
“CarMax continues to face significant affordability issues, given the still 35%+ increase in average vehicle prices and today’s higher interest rate environment, likely driving up monthly payments 40%-50% above pre-pandemic levels,” Truist Financial Corp. analyst Scot Ciccarelli said in a note to clients.
On the earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Bill Nash said that some customers “are going down to a different level of car, just to make sure that they can afford the monthly payments.”
Here’s how CarMax’s CEO Bill Nash describes it:
“We continue to drive sequential improvements in our business despite persistent widespread pressures across the used car industry. Through deliberate steps we are taking to control what we can, we delivered strong retail and wholesale gross profit per unit, reduced SG&A, and stabilized CAF’s net interest margin.”
I like the honesty of “control what we can.” The bit about net interest margin is interesting. Just like airlines are basically credit card point operations that happen to own planes, at some level these big new/used car operations are just big lenders with retail storefronts. The net interest margin is basically the difference between what they get in interest from their buyers and the cost of the money they borrow. Interest rates are way up for consumers, but also way up for big institutional borrowers.
How does this affect you, hopeful car buyer? If you’re someone with a little money, the increase in new car volume (pending the strike) is a pretty good sign. If you can afford a big down payment and can swallow a high car payment, you can get a vehicle that’s likely a little net cheaper than it would have been the last couple of terrible years, especially if you can be flexible (go buy a Grand Cherokee L!). If you can’t afford a huge down payment but have decent credit, the spread is still probably ok for you and you may be able to get a decent monthly payment if you’re willing to swallow a longer term.
But if you need a car and don’t have that much money? Learn to code… err, learn to wrench. Used cars are still hard to come by and, even though depreciation has accelerated, prices are still generally up over historical norms, and borrowing money is really hard. It sucks.
CarMax will be fine and, in two years or so, the market will probably get enough cars into the system so affordability improves. It’s still better than it was, but it’s not better for everyone.
Tesla Sued By Government Agency Over Alleged Racism Directed At Black Employees
It’s the duty of good people and good employers to not foster an environment where racism is accepted and, when it does show up, to address it quickly and thoughtfully. Apparently The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) doesn’t think Tesla is fulfilling that duty, as the EEOC just sued Tesla in a lawsuit that claims that for eight years Tesla has allowed racism to fester at its Fremont plant and did nothing about it. Here are some details from Reuters yesterday:
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said in the lawsuit filed in federal court in California that from 2015 to the present, Black workers at the Tesla plant have routinely been subjected to racist slurs and graffiti, including swastikas and nooses.
Tesla has failed to investigate complaints of racist conduct and has fired or otherwise retaliated against workers who reported harassment, the EEOC said in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit adds federal charges to discrimination claims by the state of California and lawsuits by Tesla employees.
This is the same company that reportedly created a secret team to suppress customer complaints over range issues, plus there’s Tesla/X CEO Elon Musk’s ongoing beef with the ADL, and there have been a number of other labor issues reported over the years. So none of this is a great look.
Tesla has not responded to Reuters and I’m not even sure who to talk to there anymore, as Tesla disbanded its media team a few years ago.
A Tale Of Two Strikes
Striking to fight for a better life is a sacred right. We will NOT tolerate violence against our picket lines from the companies or the scabs they hire. Period. #StandUpUAW pic.twitter.com/h3h4fjO9XO
— UAW (@UAW) September 28, 2023
Someone reportedly hit striking UAW workers outside of a parts depot in Flint that GM operates and UAW President Shawn Fain is not happy about it. From Automotive News:
In a video posted Thursday morning, Fain recounted three reports of violence and intimidation directed at striking union workers in recent days, including a hit-and-run outside a GM parts depot in Flint, Mich., that injured five people.
“These attacks on our members exercising their constitutional rights to strike and picket will not be tolerated,” Fain said. “Shame on these companies for hiring violent scabs to try to break our strike.”
[…]
Stellantis responded by saying it has not brought in any outside replacement workers and accused some UAW members of disorderly conduct. The company called on Fain to stop making “misleading and inflammatory statements” that will escalate the situation.
Ish is getting real. Let’s see how it’s going on in Dearborn with this French poodle soft take from the Detroit Free Press:
“You know, I’m only the fourth member of my family to be in my position at the company in over 120 years,” Ford said. “And I’ve always taken the long view. I’m trying to build a great company for my children and my grandchildren. But it’s not just my children and grandchildren. It’s all of yours as well. We have so many multigenerational families here at Ford who depend on us to do the right thing for the future, and we will.”
He continued: “We’ll get through this like we have every other difficult time that we’ve had in 120 years. And we’ll do it by focusing on the best interests of all our employees.”
Yep, 120 years of uninterrupted peace and love between Ford and its workers. Here’s some more:
“We’ll get through this. And no, I don’t think it’ll hurt our relationship with our employees in the long run. In fact, maybe it’ll bring us all together when we come out on the other side. And that’s what I’m hopeful for,” Ford said. “We’re different than the other companies. Our employees love Ford Motor Company. They love what we stand for. And they’re proud to work for Ford. And that’s the way I feel.”
Ford CEO Jim Farley, the grandson of a Ford autoworker, feels the same way, Ford said.
“And that’s the way our employees in our plant feel,” he said. “I’m not sure that’s always true at other companies.”
Jim Farley with the shaaaaaade this morning.
We’ll see how it all ends but, I think Ford has played its hand the best so far. Do I suspect the company is super jazzed about Fain and this suddenly ascendant and militant union? Absolutely not. Is the company smart to try and play peacemaker and wear a big smile? Absolutely. Just from an optics standpoint, Ford looks extremely reasonable here, GM looks confused, and Stellantis looks downright hostile.
Ford, more than any other automaker in this strike, seems like it knows how to read the room.
WTF Is Going On In Britain?
Culture wars in the UK are so weird to me. First, PM Rishi Sunak decided to slow roll their gas car ban, and now he’s fighting against the war on motorists in the UK?
Here’s a quick update from The Guardian, which has a general left-lean:
The “plan for motorists” is expected to include moves to limit English councils’ powers to place 20mph speed limits on main roads, and to restrict the number of hours a day that car traffic is banned from bus lanes.
It is also understood to include curbs on local authorities’ ability to impose fines – and thus raise revenue – from traffic infractions caught by automatic number plate recognition cameras, and on the use of such cameras in box junctions.
Sunak is also expected to cite concerns about so-called 15-minute cities, an urban planning concept based around having shops and workplaces near homes, which some protesters claim is a UN-led conspiracy to limit people’s ability to travel.
As someone who likes to drive, you’d think that this is good news to me, but all politics is local and, to some degree, this goes back to an election in Uxbridge, England, where the liberal Labour Party was expected to pick up all three seats, but only got two because of motorist opposition to certain restrictions.
I’ve deputized our own Adrian Clarke to give us his usual sober, uncritical, and unbiased perspective:
Cheap attempt to grab votes from ‘common sense’ voters ie lunatics
The whole ULEZ expansion has been an absolute clusterfuck and he’s attempting to capitalise on some of that unrest, which although the mayor is Labour the original ULEZ was introduced when Boris Johnson was mayorThe thing about Uxbridge is Labour should have won that seat (district) but didn’t because they didn’t make much of the fact the original ULEZ was Johnson’s plan, and the expansion specifically tied to Transport for London funding, which gets its money from central government.
And the conservative central government has been defunding TFL for decades. So in a way, the mayor was stuck in between a rock and a hard place. But the Uxbridge thing is that Heathrow now falls inside the ULEZ, so ANYONE driving there now has to pay the charge, which is ridiculous
The Big Question
If you think a flood is coming, do you park your project car on the high ground because you know it’ll be so difficult to replace or do you park your reliable daily driver, knowing how expensive getting a car is right now? Asking for… reasons.
“If you think a flood is coming, do you park your project car on the high ground because you know it’ll be so difficult to replace or do you park your reliable daily driver, knowing how expensive getting a car is right now? Asking for… reasons.”
Third option: Get of these instead, park project car inside and use DD to get to high ground.
https://www.amazon.com/EVP-Extreme-Vehicle-Protection-Cover/dp/B07FCXLJPP
(Well when they’re back in stock anyway.)
“…your project car…or…your reliable daily driver…”
Leave the project car where it is and put a
second set of blockstaller jack stand underneath it.If only Fain would say he doesn’t tolerate violence *by* union members.
They need to argue for a works council, where labor makes up half the board. Yes, the board. This arrangement is popular in Germany, for example, and Ford has a big operation over there. The NLRB says it requires a union to implement in the US, and Ford (and GM and Chrysler) have one, too, so they can use the woks council with no problem.
Remember that Tesla’s Fremont facility used to be run by GM and the UAW, so the fact that they don’t want the union at Tesla speaks volumes. Same for Rivian, whose Normal, IL factory used to be UAW under Mitsu/DSM, and half of Rivian’s Normal, IL staff worked at Normal under Mitsubishi/DSM and the UAW.
Maybe they should use a union other than the UAW, such as the IBEW, for example. They might be more successful.
The UAW has too much baggage, and even other unions don’t like them.
I used to be in IBEW when I worked for AT&T, and let me tell you about the 3 contract negotiations I was there for: every single one of them was worse than the previous one, while the company was posting record profits almost every single year. And CWA (the other AT&T union) was actually looking at our contracts with envy, since theirs were much worse.
Reminder: AT&T has (or had, I haven’t been keeping up with them) a ginormous employee pool, almost all of it unionized, so in theory it should’ve had easy to use leverage in the contract negotiations, but somehow they managed to agree to ridiculous mandatory 6day work weeks of 10+ hours each, with possible 12 consecutive working days (that was in the last 2 contracts I was there for).
We would’ve LOVED to have a Shawn Fain as our union leader instead of the spineless human garbage ruling IBEW & CWA.
yep, you get it right: bad union leadership is absolutely a thing. and it does what it did to those poor folks at AT&T
Aren’t IBEW and CBA leaders elected?
UAW presidents weren’t elected until recently. Fain is the first UAW president that was actually elected.
Also, a works council would work at AT&T and anywhere else.
Re the flood question: For most people the obvious right answer is to get your daily to safety because you need to have transportation and you can figure out the project car later. Keep your income and mobility intact!
For me, it’s a tougher question. I have a Fiesta ST “daily” (but I work from home so it’s driven much less frequently), a well-used but very functional Suburban as my adventure/utility vehicle, and a classic Jag. Do I save the classic Jag because it deserves to be preserved, or do I save the Suburban because I may need to haul things and get through bad conditions after a flood, and it would be usable if not optimal for a while as a “daily”? Either way the Fiesta is toast despite loving it will all my heart and soul. I would really, really miss the Fiesta but I can work with a lot of cars as my daily and it might mean the move to an EV is here. Ironically enough, despite me being pretty sure the Suburban already survived a Texas flood common sense dictates I save it and pick up the rest of the pieces later.
6 ton jack stands are pretty tall. I bet you can get them up to about 2 feet tall. Not insanely expensive. What about putting the project car on the highest reasonable ground you can, on those jackstands. Then put the DD in safety.
Also you could strip the interior out of the project car (if it has one), fill the engine / transmission / diff all up to thr tippy top with the correct fluids & tape shut the intakes & exhaust as much as possible.
Another (possible though could be $$$ option)… save the daily & have the project car towed somewhere it is not flooding. I realize this may be difficult to figure out where to safely store it on short notice.
Flood maps Did go in to our last home purchase and as much as we liked at least 2 options effectively the ‘1000 yr’ flood maps kept us away.
If this is the UK culture war I’ll take it over the current culture war in North America. At least it isn’t full of hate speech.
Yeah they’re still using thinly veiled dog whistles over there. Ah, I remember those days …
Say what you will about dog whistles, at least they show that they know they should be ashamed of their terrible opinions.
It has struck me that the car on the high ground should be the intact car. But only because I’m a Star Wars fan.
“Culture wars in the UK are so weird to me. First, PM Rishi Sunak decided to slow roll their gas car ban, and now he’s fighting against the war on motorists in the UK?”
I don’t understand the confusion. Most motoring enthusiasts don’t want to transition to EV’s anytime soon (fact – note the sales figures), so fighting the war on motorists appears to be a consistent message with these acts.
Sales figures are generally not reflective of the desires of motoring enthusiasts.
Agreed. I’d love to get an EV–the desire is there–but myself and my friends live in apartments with no charging; I still have privacy concerns with newer cars; and it would still be a stretch for me to afford even the cheapest new car out there right now.
I’m sure I’m far from alone in that, even if I ignored privacy/data concerns.
How about a nice basic used hybrid then? Those still get great mileage and have less privacy issues than your phone.
I mean, that’s what I have now–a 2012 Prius v. My point to the original comment just being, I do still like the idea of EVs, but my desire for one will definitely not translate to a sale for a while
Understandable. A lot can happen between now and 2035 so by then charging may not be such an issue for you.
I definitely consider myself a car enthusiast (raced karts in my youth, owned a bunch of Alfas, always had at least one ‘fun car’/’go-fast’ project, I do my own wrenching, attend at least a dozen track days /year etc.), and not only wish for a faster EV transition, but I’ve been praying for an end to oil subsidies and for gas prices to at least double as a result, which would put the transition into overdrive.
The CarMax model is especially susceptible to interest rate increases, and the one-two punch of the wild upswing in used car values before the interest hikes has to hurt. When you’re trying to move volume of used cars and you ended up buying some at inflated prices just before people have to get cheaper cars for the same payments, it’s bound to hurt.
And the interest rates and lease deals you see on new cars means that a lot of people who might have been cross-shopping new and used are pushed toward new cars.
That said, CarMax can weather this sort of thing. They have massive volume and can afford to see a dip for a bit. I just looked at their site, and it looks like the shipping fees have increased (and more of them are subject to those fees) since I last looked. They’re tightening their belt and will likely ride this out easily.
I walked away from this too long to edit, but I also think CarMax could come out wildly ahead if this situation finishes off Carvana. Knock out the biggest player in nationwide used car delivery, and you’ve increased the value of massive used car lots nationwide that can ship to each other.
I don’t know if anything will fully kill off Carvana after all the times it has looked like it would fail, but it’s gotta be pretty close to full collapse, right?
I get it, the project car is the one you’re passionate about and the DD may just be an appliance… But, as someone who has lost 3 cars to 2 different floods move your daily driver to high ground. After the flood you will need to get around to get to work, to buy groceries, and to buy all new sheetrock and insulation and flooring and shit for your house. You can’t do this without a car and there will be NO CARS AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE OR RENT after the flood. Your insurance company will be overwhelmed and it will take them 30-40 days just to look at your car and another week to cut a check and then all the dealerships will be wiped out because their lots flooded too and you’ll get inline for the next batch of cars they’ve got coming in. In the meantime you’ve been borrowing friends cars for over a month and are really straining your friendships.
CarMax isn’t doing great because interest rates on used cars are batshit insane right now. There are still some reasonable ones on high volume new cars floating around here and there (I want to say I saw a Chevy add for .9% on the Silverado during football last weekend) and some great lease deals on new EVs and PHEVs.
…but on used cars? Dear god. I saw a ridiculous deal on a certified Porsche pop up yesterday and started running numbers out of curiosity. I have excellent credit, and it was showing rates between 8-11% APR for me. I can’t even imagine what the rates look like for people who don’t have great credit right now. If you can’t afford to pay in cash or buy new right now it’s a terrible time to be looking.
And wait…so you’re telling me that the fascist Afrikaner who hasn’t returned to his home country since Apartheid was lifted has an issue with racism at one of the companies he runs? I’m shocked, I tell you. SHOCKED!
the high interest rates is intended to stop the inflation caused by cheap loans and overspending by a doddering old fool in the white house. Also probably the increased cost of Cheap Chinese parts since the old Cheeto head pissed off the slave state of china. I am still baffled that he is somehow doing well in polls for a return to election and old sniffy Joe has not tipped his hand on whether he might actually try to run or not. either option and the country is even more screwed than they are currently.
Ah yes, never forget Joe Biden’s magical ability to cause inflation globally.
what a stupid post this is
I pretty much agree with Adrian’s assessment on ULEZ but I’m unfortunately not entirely sure the Tories will get creamed at the next election. They will undoubtedly loose a lot of seats but they also have a huge majority right now so they can afford too and still end up with a workable majority. I also think that the Labour Leader Kier Starmer is probably hugely competent and I like him and (would probably vote Labour if I was living in the UK right now) but he lacks any charisma (even less than Sunak has) and that will count against him when the real campaigning starts.
In the last few elections Labour has relied on London as a stronghold. The ULEZ clusterf*uck may well cost them in the general election too.
Liz Lettuce had charisma in spades though.
She never had to fight a general election but yes she hardly had an charisma either.
Adrian didn’t get it quite right: “Heathrow now falls inside the ULEZ, so ANYONE driving a non-Euro-4/6 compliant (i.e. reasonably new) car there now has to pay the charge”
Mondial drivers 100% shafted, for sure.
Adrian’s Mondial is over 40 years old I think as an early example? Historic (over 40 years old cars) are exempt. Later Mondial drivers would have a problem though.
Until their Mondial reaches 40 years, and is suddenly exempt? Nutty.
“…your project car…or…your reliable daily driver…”
The trick is to avoid having a reliable daily driver, just several project cars instead. My odds of being able to start at least one of them after a flood probably aren’t all that different than what I face every morning in order to get to work anyway.
I spent years living by this rule, and to some extent I most assuredly still do. I was rather surprised when my wife, (who doesn’t really share my love of old garbage vehicles) commented on my ’85 Nissan truck as “that stupid old reliable thing”.
I, too, would be surprised to hear an ’85 described as “old.”
At one point all my 3 cars were old Alfa Romeos (Alfa Sprint QV, Alfetta turbodiesel, GTV), and my soon-to-be-wife told me to borrow a car for going to the city hall to get married, because the Alfetta TD (which was the daily, as the others had ‘some small issues’) would only jump-start if parked on an incline, and the city hall was on a level street and she wasn’t gonna help push it in her wedding dress, with the car’s back covered in diesel soot 🙂
She is a keeper for sure!!!
Is there anything more left field than an Alfetta TD? Maybe the three-cylinder Alfa 33 Turbodiesel. Anyhow, big props on your life choices.
I have a bicycle that I named “Reliable Transportation” for a reason.
personally, I’d park the project on the high ground, But that’s just me. my project is worth 4-8 times what my daily is, and is lower, so i would absolutely park that one on the high ground. for reference, my daily is a 2nd gen explorer with 200k miles and a bad transmissions, so its worth like $800, so my opinion on this is skewed.
On the earnings call, Chief Executive Officer Bill Nash said that some customers “are going down to a different level of car, just to make sure that they can afford the monthly payments.”
I’m sorry, is Nash insinuating this is a bad thing?
For their business model, it very directly is bad if your buyers are driven to cheaper products. For the consumer, it suggests that buying power is diminished.
It would only be a good thing if it were a sign that more buyers are financially literate, which I doubt is the cause.
I’m not shocked at all that the EEOC is getting involved with Tesla.
I remember back in 2017 when the first allegations of Tesla’s discriminatory environment hit. This was the same year as the Boring Company and the Model 3 announcements, and I (embarassingly) had a high opinion of Musk at the time. But after seeing the allegations, I reasoned that if there was *one* responsibility a CEO held, it was to set the culture of the workplace. The only way there could be that level of discrimination in the factories was if the supervisors didn’t care, and that means the upper management who selected them also didn’t care. The fish rots from the head.
And that’s the story of the first time I wondered if this Elon guy was really just a piece of shit.
You’re not alone in admiring the dude for a time. It took a while before the extent of his douche-baggery became well known. Now I wouldn’t take a Tesla if you paid me, not because they’re not good cars, but just because I hate the man behind them.
I don’t know, I foresee a bunch of people trading up when car prices and interest rates lower. Then they’ll roll negative equity into a new loan.
Exactly. While his bigotry and despotism were still a secret and the most contriversial thing he did was being a little cheeky, he gave a whole lot of disillusioned nerds an excuse to believe — for just a moment — that maybe the future was going to be okay.
I’m not so embarassed I fell for it, I’m more embarassed I got my hopes up.
Agreed but I am in full support of Elon’s current mission–to burn Twatter to the ground.
Yeah, I’d like for him to borrow against some more Tesla shares and add TikTok to his burgeoning social media empire, work the same magic he’s brought to X, between the two, it might be the only way to salvage his legacy and reputation
It would be interesting to see if there are any sales figures to support a lack of sales of Ford products from its start up years bc Henry was an antisemite, likewise for people now who wouldn’t buy a Tesla bc of Elon.
Elon seems to be a rather complex person filled with all sorts of contradictions. Sadly 7 years after Bob Lutz and a slew of ‘knowledgeable industry experts’said the competition is coming and really none seem that close, certainly not from an economic position of strength Tesla (like any company) is about a hell of a lot more than the person in the cat seat, even when that person is the founder (or sudo founder); & Tesla currently finds itself as still the maket product leaders in the segments they’re in with advantages such as… zero legacy ice LOB to have to shut down, no massive financially leveraged positions, no pension concerns, no labor strikes, vertical integration issues…
Oh and Tesla is also only one of 3 ‘auto companies’ that is actually selling evs at a profit, both of the other 2 being Chinese (BYD and Alion) and we don’t (yet) have the option in “capitalist free market of the world ‘Merica'” to buy from either of those companies even if we wanted to*
*which could be a Huge NOPE precisely bc they are Chinese companies. Which if that’s a person’s stance that rules out Lotus, Volvo, Polestar (+ Zeeker and of course Geely itself) as well as MG, EAV? (formerly Saab)
What other originally western auto brands are now Chinese owned?
Approximately same story here. Last decade I loved the S and almost enjoyed the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos. Then there were reports of how his people were being worked to burnout, his insistence on Autopilot, free-speech absolutism, shutting people out of being able to work on totaled Teslas, etc. Last year everything ramped up, and this year it became clear to me that, while I admire what the cars can do, I want no part of owning something Elon can brick at a whim (and that’s apart from my opinion of him which also precludes owning anything he built).
I really wonder how much sales have dropped due to his behavior. I know sales are still going up, but my sister recently took delivery of a Polestar2 rather than the Tesla she was planning on some 18ish months ago. I jumped into an old BMW instead of continuing to save towards a 3. And those were before were heard about the seriousness of the animal abuse in his Neuralink project
The Neuralink stuff reads like something straight out of Resident Evil.
Even if Musk’s public behavior was perfectly fine, I’d be hesitant to buy a Tesla just because of removing the radar sensors — I’m professionally experienced enough with automation to know that was a stupid choice made by people who don’t listen to engineers.
Also, the alternatives are getting damn good. The 2024 Volvo/Polestar lineup is top notch, the BMW iX’s efficiency might as well be a magic trick, and Mercedes just launched the first (legal) hands-off/eyes-off autonomous driving system — and if it crashes, Mercedes takes liability. There’s a lot to like and a lot to respect from other automakers in the EV space.
“BMW iX’s efficiency might as well be a magic trick”
Hmm, A German car company with fuel efficency that’s hard to believe…
Uh oh..
Touché.
Clearly there must be a common rail diesel engine hidden up front and people are secretly filling it up via the “windshield washer fluid refill port” that’s why only the dealership is supposed to be able to open the hood 🙂
I left for a trip and a huge storm hit metro Detroit while I was away. The street flooded several inches, up to the bottom of the door frame of my GMC Envoy that was parked on the street. I would leave the car with the highest ground clearance outside but I would park on the grass or sidewalk if I had to.
I wouldn’t live in a flood prone zone 🙂
However, If I can put both on higher ground, I would put my DD, as I will need it first. Now if the project car is actually worth more than my DD, I don’t know what’d do LOL
To be fair, sometimes you don’t live in a flood prone zone. And then suddenly you do.
That happened to me 1 month after we bought out first house. It was not in a flood zone then a tropical storm came to visit and we flooded and the next year they updated the flood maps and put us in one. Flood insurance went up 6x after that. Unless you’re moving to the top of a mountain you just never know.
In my area, an old neighborhood ended up behind a flood levy built in the 1930’s. In 2012 FEMA decided that levy was a foot too short and decertified it. Everyone behind it suddenly had to buy flood insurance because they were determined to now be in Zone A or AE flood zone. People who had lived there for decades suddenly found themselves stuck with a new bill and reduced ability to sell the house. No surprise, it’s a low-income neighborhood.
NYC is a flood zone today
Having worked with flood amelioration, I definitely checked out the flood maps before buying. But who knows what things will be like in ten years, or in 2052 when my mortgage is supposed to be paid off.
Aren’t there like a million parking garages in NYC?
Unless the project car doesn’t run, it’s unclear to me why both couldn’t be saved with a small amount of effort.
NYC parking garages are stupid expensive, especially if you don’t have a monthly package already for parking. I can only imagine how much a 48 hour weekend stint would be, but in most cases it should be less than the car would cost to replace (unless it was one of David’s jeeps).
Hell, park illegally and risk a tow that would also take the car to safety (hopefully)
I am not in NYC so maybe I’m off base, but out my way tow yards would not count as “safety”. I mean, sure, they’re fenced in, but they are also on the cheapest land available – which usually means down by the river in a flood plain.
I don’t know much about NYC either, but my assumption was “closer to the water = more expensive”; maybe that isn’t the case.
Fair enough, that would make sense.
Personally I’m on board with the “top of a parking garage is probably cheaper than your insurance deductible” idea.
You’d think. Here, we like to use the nicest parcels of land for the most unpleasant activities.
They’re frequently full, and parking there for a full week will cost you as much as a decent project car. I parked for 90 minutes near my job a few months back and it cost $60 (tip not included).
Also, because of the recent Local Law 126 most parking garages are undergoing repairs and many are closed down. But yeah, I would drive off to higher ground and park anywhere that looked safe – tickets will be less than cost of a flooded car.
“The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) said in the lawsuit filed in federal court in California that from 2015 to the present, Black workers at the Tesla plant have routinely been subjected to racist slurs and graffiti, including swastikas and nooses.”
In the freaking Bay Area?! And nobody in management had a problem with it?! I guess nothing with Tesla should really be a surprise anymore, but that’s all at least a bit surprising
You get 35 miles south or east of Fremont and you are in hard core red territory. I’m talking Brodozer, gun rack, flat bill hat, Monster Energy tattoo, redneck red.
The big question- if the project car is an old Jeep, that regularly gets driven through a couple feet of water anyway, park the daily on the high ground, as the project car probably won’t even notice the flooding unless it gets 3 feet deep.
You put both on high ground. You inconvenience yourself for one to two days now, rather than potentially deal with thousands of dollars in damage plus and future inconvenience.
I’m parking the project car on the high ground, and verifying I have full coverage on the daily so if it floods out I can get the insurance to pay for something else. Also I currently hate my DD and really look forward to getting the project back on the road, and if the DD were to be rendered no longer road worthy it would motivate me to get the project going faster.
This is the way.
You get the insurance money, use that to get the project car up to daily driver status, and if there’s any left over, put that toward a NEW project car!
^This guy gets it!
Doug DeMuro’s Range Rover is still responsible for CarMax’s monetary losses
See also his Aston
Can the purely hypothetical person in this scenario park the reliable car on high ground and get, say, a massive sheet of visqueen to essentially put the project car into a massive plastic bag for protection?
Alternatively, could the person do some work to protect the project car via sandbags or the like?
Ideally, you keep the reliable car accessible and usable while also protecting the project car.
If the garage is likely to flood, then move the reliable car to the highest ground. Move the project car to the next-highest stable ground, put it up on blocks for elevation and tarp it.
Go to Home Depot, buy two of the largest, thickest plastic tarp you can. Place tarp on ground, drive car onto tarp. Wrap the tarp up over the car and tie it off on the roof. Now, take the 2nd tarp, and place it over the top of the car draping down, and tie it off. Your car is now good for about 3-4 feet of flooding. Oh, and cross your fingers.