This is shaping up to be the third major global financial crisis of my professional life, which feels like two too many. [Editor’s note: I think it’s telling that Matt feels there’s at least one global financial crisis to be expected in one’s professional life – JT] There’s an idea that this one is different because it’s self-inflicted and not caused by some exogenous event, like the pandemic. I don’t entirely buy this because the first one also felt like a man-made event. How do I know? My first job out of college was working in the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) market.
If this is your first time reading The Morning Dump, I feel like this little bit of prologue is helpful in judging anything I might say. It was 2005 and the job market was showing weakness, so I took the first position I was offered at a firm that did third-party due diligence for large commercial MBS deals. These deals were happening so fast that the banks outsourced the job of proving they were legit to companies like the one I worked for, and my company was doing this analysis so quickly that it hired a small internal team to help produce the research.
It quickly became obvious to me and my girlfriend, who also worked there, that while any individual deal analysis made sense, that, taken together, any slip in the market would likely be catastrophic given all the underlying assumptions. I remember when the so-called elite bankers came down from [redacted] to visit our offices. They were barely older than I was, and I don’t remember a single one of them saying anything smart. By day two, they were mostly just hungover and ranking strip clubs instead of tranches.
While it was the comically overleveraged residential MBS market that took down the economy, the collapse of the commercial MBS market didn’t help. My girlfriend and I both found other jobs before the collapse happened, which is why I do this. It didn’t even occur to me at the time that there was a way to make money off the collapse, as they did in The Big Short, which is all to say that you should take anything I say with an enormous grain of salt.
This is a car site, anyway, and so I’m going to talk about cars. It would be nice to think that, if the markets continue to implode and we drop into a recession, which is a real possibility according to a recent CNBC survey, car prices would come down. Unfortunately, that’s not a given this time.
I’m going to start this morning with what happened the last two times we experienced a global financial crisis and why car prices were only briefly cheaper, which is what I think is going to happen this time. Why? A new analysis shows that most of the cheap cars you might want aren’t built here, and building them here might make them more expensive.
That isn’t to say that all the cheap cars are built elsewhere. Nissan might be shifting Rogue production here as automakers try to get around tariffs, though that isn’t a guarantee that we’ll suddenly get a huge increase in production, at least based on some other signs.
And, finally, even if production does shift here, even the mastermind of the trade war admitted this weekend that it’s going to have to be robots building things if we can to keep prices down, which is also what I’m hearing murmurs of from automakers.
Why A Global Crisis Doesn’t Make Cars Cheaper
Above is a great graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank showing the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers: New Vehicles in U.S. City Average. This covers 90% of the total population of the United States, and when the line goes up, people are paying more for cars, and when it goes down, they’re paying less. The little gray bits are the bad times. You can see the pandemic in 2020 and the Great Recession in 2008.
What’s interesting about this graphic is that the bad times don’t really line up with huge negative price shocks. You can see that cars got a little cheaper during the Great Recession and, briefly, stayed flat early in the pandemic. The expansion of the economy during the early Obama-era recovery, a shift in tastes away from sedans towards more expensive crossovers, and the reduction in used car inventory following Cash-For-Clunkers are all to blame for why we didn’t see prices for cars go down.
During the pandemic, the lack of available cars and a shift towards more expensive models (which I call trimflation) meant the sharpest increase in new car price increases going back at least to the 1950s. If you’re curious why cars got relatively cheaper starting in the 1990s, free trade (the thing the Trump admin is trying to get rid of) is one part of the equation.
Ok, I’ve written long enough that the markets have now opened in the United States and it’s officially a “bear market,” if only briefly (it seems like stocks are coming back a bit). The goal here by the Trump Administration is to build prosperity by erasing trade deficits. That is a thing that could happen. Or, as Robinhood’s trade director Stephanie Guild just said on Bloomberg, the tariffs are a “tax on every American.”
The 25% Tariff On Imported Vehicles Will Apply To 80% Of Vehicles Priced Under $30,000
Charts are fun, this feels like a good morning for charts.
This one is from Cox Automotive, which has a big analysis of the tariff policy out, and the reality is that these tariffs will impact cheaper cars in a big way:
According to our analysis, the average price of a new vehicle in the U.S. is north of $48,000. Importantly, however, more than 40% of new-vehicle sales by volume in 2024 were priced under $40,000. These “lower-priced” vehicles are particularly vulnerable to the new tariffs.
Our analysis suggests the 25% tariff on imported vehicles will apply to nearly 80% of vehicles priced under $30,000. Vehicles in this category include popular models such as the Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, Chevy Trax and Trailblazer, Nissan Sentra and Honda HR-V.
What does all this mean for average vehicle prices?
In the coming months and years, as new tariffs settle into place, vehicle prices in the U.S. are expected to increase. A bill for the 25% duty at the border for imported vehicles and a 25% tariff on foreign content in vehicles assembled inside the U.S. will likely result in price inflation within the auto industry. Our expectation is that vehicles impacted by these tariffs could see prices increase 10-15%. In addition, given market dynamics, we also anticipate seeing at least a 5% increase in prices of vehicles not subjected to the full 25% tariff.
So, not down.
Some Jobs Will Come Back To The United States
Nissan has had a rough go of it and was considering cutting back jobs at the Tennessee plant that builds the Rogue. Now? According to Nikkei Asia, it’s possible that production does shift back to its plant.
Struggling with poor performance, Nissan had planned to halve shifts on some of U.S. production lines from April, reducing the number of Rogues and other models being made. Because of the tariffs, the company has decided to scrap those plans and instead increase production.
The Trump policy imposes a 25% tariff on cars imported from Japan and other countries, which raises the cost of exporting vehicles produced in Fukuoka.
Other Japanese automakers may follow suit. Automobiles are a key industry in Japan, with product shipments equivalent to about 10% of gross domestic product. The transfer of production overseas would lead to a drop in GDP, and measures to combat the hollowing out of the country’s industrial base will become a major challenge.
Does this mean that we could see the long-term shift in production to our shores? Maybe. Investment takes forever and requires confidence in the system. Are people confident in the system? Not so much. Welcome to the resistance… Bill Ackman?
It’s not impossible, though, as automakers can eventually do something. From that same Cox Automotive analysis linked above:
The auto industry is a high-cost, complex, long-horizon business that operates best in a stable, consistent environment. However, it is also a highly innovative, tech-intensive industry and one that has recently come under increased pressure by the success of Chinese manufacturers that have raced ahead in terms of speedy and efficient development cycles, as well as cost efficiency.
This situation comes at a time when traditional automakers are deeply engaged in rethinking decades of ingrained production methodologies. So, while the business of building, selling and servicing vehicles is highly dynamic, given sufficient time, investment, and the proper incentives, automakers and dealers should be able to navigate this challenge. The toughest part will be doing so without pricing more consumers out of the new-vehicle market, shrinking the market further.
How do we make cars cheaper?
This Probably Only Works With Increased Automation
Lutnick: “The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones — that kind of thing is going to come to America.”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) April 6, 2025 at 10:52 AM
If there’s one face to put on all of this, it’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. While a lot of this is built on the President’s preferences, a lot of those preferences were informed by Secretary Lutnick. Conveniently, he was out on “Face The Nation” this Sunday explaining why we’re putting tariffs on penguins to bring jobs back here.
It’s anyone’s guess how any of this actually goes down, but if all the jobs come back here, it’s hard to imagine how the prices do anything but go upwards without some kind of labor shift. That labor shift? Probably robots.
You can read the whole transcript here, and I’m going to focus on one piece, about how this is going to relate to employment:
MARGARET BRENNAN: And you said that robots are going to fill those jobs. So those aren’t union worker jobs.
SEC. LUTNICK: No, it’s really automated jobs. It’s automated factories- automated factories. But the key is, who’s going to build the factories? Who’s going to operate the factories? Who’s going to make them work? Great American workers. You know, we are going to replace–
MARGARET BRENNAN: You said robots on other networks. You said that to FOX.
SEC. LUTNICK: –the armies of millions of people- well, remember, the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little- little screws to make iPhones, that kind of thing is going to come to America. It’s going to be automated and great Americans- the tradecraft of America, is going to fix them, is going to work on them. They’re going to be mechanics. There’s going to be HVAC specialists. There’s going to be electricians, the tradecraft of America. Our high school educated Americans- the core to our workforce, is going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America. That’s what’s going to build our next generation of America.
This sounds a little bit like the old joke about how the bad news is robots are taking your jobs, but the good news is someone has to fix the robots, but the worst news is that someone just designed a robot that fixes robots.
My question is: Are there enough people to do these robot-repair jobs? There’s already an automotive technician shortage in the United States. What exactly is going to change that? The answer, I guess, is more robots.
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
For no reason, “Yoshimi Battles The Bing Robots Pt. 1” by The Flaming Lips is on my mind this morning.
The Big Question
If I handed you $50,000 today and you had to spend it on cars, what would you buy? How many cars?
As someone around Matt’s age, I think that feels reasonable. We really entered the workforce right around the time of a significant financial crisis that we believed was a once-in-a-lifetime event. It was inconvenient at the start of our careers, but at least we thought we’d be okay when we got through it.
Now that we’ve seen a few, one per career seems reasonable. Our expectations are really skewed. Gen Z is bound to expect a crisis per decade as a baseline.
I’m a bit older but my professional life has encompassed; 9-11, the 2008 Financial Crisis, COVID, and now this. I’m getting really tired of living in “interesting times”…
Throughout history “interesting times” was some combination of War, Famine, Pestilence and Death.
Sure we’ve had Covid-19 (and HIV) but as global pandemics go those have been no Spanish flu nor Black Death. Even in the less interesting times you’d have been too poor, too overworked and to overrun with kids, fleas, rats and crime to worry about big boy financial issues.
That’s a good point, I was in college in the wake of 9-11, so I was somewhat insulated from that one.
War is, sadly, a profitable business, so the economic shock was somewhat mitigated by the military industrial complex getting to ramp up even more than usual. I lived in WA at the time, so the money flowing to Boeing and the multiple military bases probably further shielded us from really feeling any economic impact there.
But the sudden shift in the world was very real.
And just before 911 was the .com bubble burst
Yes, how’d I forget about that one…
These once-in-a-lifetime events are becoming like thousands year floods. They’re happening way more frequently than they used to.
They aren’t really happening more frequently, we, as a whole, are just better at noticing them now.
The power of the internet!
From memory… from at least the crash of 1929 till now, there has been a significant market correction or recession once every 7-11 years on average.
Right now in 2025 is the 1st instance where a market correction has been directly the result of the US executive branch fiscal policy alone. Just 7 days later the market is down over 10 percent.
Prior corrections or recessions…
2020 pandemic
2008 mortgage backed securities
2001 911
1999 .com bubble burst
1991 cause?
1987 Black Monday
1981?
1972-73 oil crisis
1967 ?
1958 ?
Some of above is memory from reading Ben Graham’s Intelligent Investor and “Securities Analysis” both excellent books.
If you are interested I’d recommend starting with the Intelligent Investor as it was written for the lay person and therefore is more approachable. If you make it through that and you want more… then read Securities Analysis.
Just one per career would be unreasonable. I worked through seven of the “bad times” marked by gray bars on Matt’s graph from the St. Louis Fed.
So, I spent a couple of decades engineering, designing, installing, and commissioning industrial automation systems for facilities like oil refineries, chemical plants, manufacturing facilities, assembly lines, etc., and my takeaway when it comes to people talking about adaptations to automation is this: people willing to adapt will adapt, but I unfortunately know first-hand through years and years of running under-staffed crews and interviewing anyone who can string together a coherent sentence that there is no great pool of American workers waiting out there to do this type of work. It will take years, and perhaps even decades (if ever) to bring that level of automated assembly to this country, and that assumes we have willing and capable people educated and trained in that type of work ready to help out immediately.
Thank you for the hard work and this great comment. I worry that instead of training people to work on automation and resilient jobs that automation and or AI cannot take away, The US will just fall deeper into the pit of anti-immigrant ignorance and hate. Hopefully we can pull out of that muck before we go full on genocidal fascism.
I too hope folks will choose to adapt to the technology we have today, as it isn’t going away anytime soon. Almost each time I installed an automation system there were folks raging against me (not their bosses who hired me) that I was there to steal food from their children’s mouths. And almost each time I would give them tools to adapt, including teaching them how things worked and training them to support and maintain the systems, and the folks either adapted and invariably found their work lives, and salaries, improved, or ended up walking out the door, most often voluntarily, because they wanted things to be like they were “in the good old days” that likely never actually existed.
People are either pro-learning or anti-learning and your post highlights that. It has gotten worse as thinking, learning, growing, change, and education are now seen as anti-masculine.
I had the good luck to once design and install a (for this factory fairly small) automation system. Luckily this was about 10 years after the main production lines had been automated and it was the first investment in new products in years, so the union guys loved having me there – this was incremental jobs. I also loved these union guys – I went from one non-union biotech factory where I couldn’t get the electrician to drop an outlet without micro-managing the instructions to this plant where the union guys were like – tell us where the machine is going, we’ll get the power to it, and the next morning it was up and running. The cleaning crew did ruin what, at the time was an expensive category 5 cable we used for programming the PLC, but that was my fault for leaving it out to be sprayed down by the sanitation crew overnight.
Won’t home schooling and the WWE education department help?
Our state has voted in school vouchers (by representatives, not public vote) to help further defund the public schools and give a break to those that already send their kids to private schools.
I will give credit to our Govenor for pumping a lot of money/resources into building up our tech/trade schools. He actually fulfilled a campaign promise!
One of the fundamental conceptual stupidities of right wing economists is they think labor is a fluid commodity like soybeans or limestone.
If there’s a railroad wreck in California which cuts feed corn supplies, it’s not long before the supply network is rerouted to meet demand, and pricing efficiently reflects any additional costs.
Labor takes years to adjust. And on top of that, there are no direct ethical issues if raw iron piles up in Minnesota – the iron doesn’t suffer. Putting huge numbers of people out of work has lasting effects even if some eventually get new jobs.
Well said. To add to that, the labor aspect isn’t simply getting warm bodies into a job – it is the training aspect, as I mentioned before, but in these spaces it is also specific knowledge that can’t easily be taught. As I mentioned in a previous response, people assumed the automation system was going to render them unemployed. Most of the time, it allowed companies to fire people they were already hoping to fire, but nearly everyone else had specific knowledge of how the facility operated that comes only from experience, so they would be retained and trained into a new role. In bringing new, large-scale manufacturing to the new US, that knowledge gap will exist regardless of how well people know the systems. A new assembly line can take years to optimize and work out the kinks, and that’s true in other countries that have personnel experienced and trained in the process that know what to look out for. For new processes here with inexperienced folks, the reality is even the biggest companies could go bankrupt trying to make things work – just look at Intel. The news pundits make it seem like manufacturing is easy, but the unfortunate reality is that it is extremely hard, and that’s the reason why the US has become one of the top exporters of consulting expertise to the rest of the world on how to make it work.
20 years as a precision manual/cnc machinist here, and this is spot on. The number of co-workers and especially bosses are content knowing nothing and refusing to improve is just incomprehensible to my autistic ass.
Just this year I tried to introduce adding variables to some programs to account for taper on a lathe, (.0002″ flatness callout is… finicky) no one on the floor knew what a varable was, and the bosses didn’t want to “train” anyone.
Maddening.
A little off topic, but I once got handed a drawing I had to rush out for subcontracting that was 0.00008″ flatness across 30″ in nylon. I had to laugh the guy out of my office
The coal miners would like to enter the chat…
I’m not a fan of dirty fossil fuels, but man, did those areas get wrecked by the move to greener energy.
More should have been done to support those areas as the coal industry died. I guess, to some, that makes me a Libtard.
It wasn’t just the green energy – the mines changed the way the operated and needed way fewer miners. Strip mining a mountaintop is not only worse environmentally than digging holes and shafts, it also requires way less miners. Also lots of better equipment in underground mines these days that requires fewer workers.
And what’s the coal is gone, it’s gone
New? Top Model Vanderhall Brawley.
Used? I’d consider a GTR, but likely end up spending it on things like a ’66 Charger and ’39 Pontiac
Says
and describes a bunch of jobs for educated tradespeople and engineers. The only high school educated people in those plants (if they come here, most won’t) will be packing boxes and sweeping floors.
What are you talking about? There’s going to be a six figure manufacturing job for every person in the rust belt who wants one! Big, beautiful jobs! People are talking about my jobs. They’re saying they’re the best jobs we’ve ever had.
New factories will fall out of the sky in rural areas all over the country.
That was kinda happening with the IRA and CHIPS Act funding. But our new leader decided that not billionaire Americans don’t deserve nice things.
I may not know much, but I do know that I don’t want a factory falling on me, or the barn.
Just the other day I went up to the president with tears in my eyes and I said “Thank you, sir! Thank you for these beautiful jobs.”
LOL!!!
You must be a Big Strong Silent Mountain of a man 😉
Insert crying laughing emoji here…
The days of a life-long job with a pension and getting hired the day after graduating high-school with a D+ average are long gone and will never return.
Umm, the railroad still exists.
The only resurgence I see is in the amount of gaslighting by our government.
Heck, even packing boxes may well require an associate’s degree, at least if you want to make a career out of it. Pretty common now to allow someone in with a diploma, but require a degree to move up or get decent raises, even in areas where the education isn’t necessary for the work.
I was just researching the vacuum cup actuator market – sure enough robots that pick and place boxes coming off assembly lines are a big thing and they work really well.
They make warehouse sweeping robots! I’ve been wanting to get one.
I’m imagining a giant roomba called Roomba Commercial that’s about 3 feet in diameter and can run on propane or battery.
Amazon.com: Makita DRC200Z 18V X2 LXT Lithium-Ion 36V Brushless Cordless Robotic Vacuum Kit – Tool Only : Home & Kitchen
The Makita one is pretty small at 18″. Guess I better get 2.
I’d get an NA Miata with a non-rusty chassis and broken engine and convert it to electrons to replace my GTI for track fun. Then maybe another bike (I really want an Aprilia RS660), since I’m all set for daily-driving duties with my TDI wagon with only 180k miles, I probably won’t have to worry for at least another 100k about looking into a replacement.
On your TDI you are actually in the range of miles to consider if you need to proactively spend more money to ensure it remains reliable or roll the dice or move on
Based on VW forums and my own annicdotal experience having owned 3… About 180-200k is when several parts may need replacing.
Commonly this may include…
1. Interior blower fan motor (the bearings go out)
2. AC system
3. Good time to proactively replace the coolant hoses
4. Check the suspension for replacing the bushings + springs and shocks/struts
5. Ignition switch
6. On TDIs the timing belt interval used to be 60k miles, though I think it is likely it is 120k miles on yours, good time to check the accessory belt and associated pullys
7. Worth checking the intake for buildup from the egr as well as the N75? valve
8. Oh also if you live somewhere it gets cold below freezing check the glow plugs too
I already did the timing belt/WP at 130k (that’s the interval), I’ve also replaced the struts with Koni reds at 150k (weren’t broken, just wanted to get rid of the under-damped feeling of OEM struts) and LC arms (as a “while you’re in there” item, and they came with balljoints in them).
The glow plugs are fine (Chicago winters would let me know otherwise), I don’t have ignition switch (push-button start), the blower fan doesn’t make any noise, but if it does it’ll be a tool-less replacement to be done in 3 mins.
I do think an intake cleaning should be done at some point, but it looks to be a major pain, maybe I’ll attempt to tackle it this summer.
Well, just over a month ago I picked up my ’25 GR86 Hakone Edition for $41k out the door. So, if you had given me $50k I would have bought one of those and spent the remaining $9k on as many junk Beetles as I can get my hands on.
On the $50k question, I don’t know whether I would want to buy an FJ Cruiser and outfit it for the coming end times, or a snazzy convertible so I could go out in style.
Maybe I should buy a cheap compact and invest the rest in Tesla stock. It can’t go any lower, right? Right?
RIGHT?!?
80 Series > FJ.
We do have plenty of idle children not pulling their weight here in the USA….
Apparently in Florida, in particular.
The question of “if we get rid of immigrants then who will be working the fields” was continually dismissed over the last year. Thankfully, the people smarter than me have finally solved this issue.
You mean the children who need to serve detention from 3-8 PM for sassing (no eye contact/staring/mumbling/shouting/not raising hand/not letting anyone else answer) the teacher? With a bonus detention on Saturday from 8-5 for not getting their homework done?
I wish that was snark.
I wish you knew what it was actually like inside a public school if you think this is in any way accurate.
Thank you. People who where in school 40 years ago do not get what school is like now.
Today: “Why is the teacher approaching me with a ruler in their hand??”
40 years ago: “Oh shit, I fucked up”
Posted quickly. I should have waited. Trying to be funny, but it’s all too possible these days.
The children yearn for the mines.
I’d probably buy something for utility and something for fun (maybe a wagon and a convertible), then sell my current vehicle to recoup most of the $50k and use that for sensible things like mortgage.
Man, I’m boring during economic uncertainty.
Solid approach
For $50k, my budget would be:
$25k for a nice second-generation VW Bus
$12k for a 2003 or older F250/F350 7.3 diesel (these have gone up in value, but $12k can still buy a decent one)
$5k for a Honda CT70
$8k to fix up the ’72 Beetle project car I bought last week
Please give me $50,000, by the way.
This seems like a good plan. If we’re voting on who actually gets the $50k, you’re definitely in the running.
I’d funnel that 50K into the restoration that my GTO needs.
Pontiac or Ferrari?
1970 Pontiac. My mom’s first and only brand new car.
A really nice Mercedes W123 300D, the one with the five cylinder diesel. With the money left over I’d consider a small side-by-side with huge suspension travel and an enclosed trailer.
Trump’s War on Movement.
Tariffs make new cars and parts for existing ones more expensive, and indirectly push up prices of used cars and taxi/rideshare, while other policies defund mass transit and walk/bike infrastructure.
The oligarchy wants you stuck so you’ll work cheap.
They had this thing against people moving freely back in the ‘good ole times’ where you were tied to the land you were working on (owned by the nobility), it was called serfdom.
I guess going back to that is what’ll ‘make america great again’ 🙂
For $50K I could not get the new wrangler, bronco, 4runner, tacoma I would want so I would probably buy a new Nissan Frontier pro-4x long box. I am not going to speculate about $50K for a used car as there are too many variables.
I don’t know if street legal UTVs would count as cars but if so I’d get the Polaris Ranger XP Kinetic optioned with a full cab with glass windows, heater, fast charger, etc. and get a set of Michelin’s UTV Tweels for it.
If I couldn’t do that I’d probably get a new base model 500e in black to compare to my Leaf, replace the stock tires with quality tires, and get a set of wheels and snow tires for it with what was left over.
Honestly the Leaf is a bit longer of a vehicle than I’d like relative to the ground clearance it has. If it had a few inches more ground clearance I could drive right up to the parking curb every time to make sure I’m in the space, not having to play a game of chicken with my front facia trying to get as close to the parking curb as possible without hitting it with said facia.
You are supposed to stop before your bumper is over the sidewalk. You know, so people can use the sidewalk
Bonus points to Heck if your truck has a hitch and you back in so the hitch blocks the sidewalk
I’m referring to parking lots… Hence “parking curb”
Sorry. I read that as “parking at the curb “ and it set off a pet peeve of mine
No worries. It can apply, though most places I see with a sidewalk between parking spaces also have a buffer with plants or a rock most likely because of your justified pet peeve.
That being said beggars can’t be choosers, and short automobile options are very limited. The 500e is really the only automobile I can think of sold in the US today where you can park it in a parking spot and not have to pull all the way in or nearly all the way in to know you are in the parking spot. It’s properly short. However it’s also made by Stellantis, has pretty meh handling, uses CCS, and has unusable rear seats.
For my use case I really only need 3 seats in an automobile (including the driver’s seat), but noone makes a car like that for sale in the US today. Personally I think the 500e would be much more practical as a 3 seat car with the center console deleted and a center mounted rear seat so the center console space becomes their legroom, however the engineers at fiat think it’s more practical to have rear seats built to only work with bilateral leg amputees than for the overwhelming majority of the population.
So while I feel your pet peeve is justified, I think more of the blame is with the automakers than the consumers parking what the automakers make.
If used is an option, probably a 2-3 year old Model S Plaid. If it has to be a new car, I have no idea. There’s not much out there in that range that interests me enough to actually want it in my garage.
All of this nonsense is literally designed to make life worse for the lower and middle class and so far it’s working as intended. Everything gets more expensive, solid working class jobs get replaced by automation, and every opportunity for upward mobility is snuffed out slowly but surely. The .1% controlling every aspect of this country don’t want us to own anything.
They want us to have to pay them exorbitant sums of money for our entire lives to lease everything we need while we work for paltry wages until the day we die. They’re rapidly advancing AI to take over literally every job and they’re selling it as some kind of miracle. Shit fuckin sucks, but don’t look at me. I didn’t vote for this clown show.
Anyway with 50k in cash I’d just go buy my wife the CX90 she wants before the tariffs make it a $60,000+ proposition. It feels wild and tragic to say it out loud, but even though cars are more expensive than ever right now these are the good times compared to what lies ahead. I’d honestly like to just buy now while the gettin’s good but my wife/most of my family are firmly in the “cars are a waste of money” camp and are going to be in our ears every single time this comes up, so I assume she’s driving her CRV until it dies.
Maybe I’m an idiot doing enthusiast math (this is highly likely) but I’d rather just rip the band aid off now than wait and see what happens. It seems better to me to pay for a $50,000 car today (and Mazda always has promotions/low APR in house financing) when we’d probably get $10,000+ on our trade in than wait another year or two and see what kind of hell the tariffs wreak on prices.
We’re fortunate in that we can still afford to buy a car even at the current astronomical prices. Unfortunately that might be going away sooner rather than later…and as bleak as it sounds I kind of want to make sure we’re as close to owning everything we have as we can be in case the techno feudalism becomes fully realized.
I get buying right now before things get worse. I bought my Camry Hybrid in 2022 when everyone was saying to wait for the supply of cars to improve, but what everyone didn’t realize was that interest rates were going to go up and take a huge bite out of any savings that would happen as soon as inventory increased. Even with the markup I paid, I came out ahead overall on interest alone.
Seeing as how prices are only going to get worse, it makes a lot of sense to buy stuff now before it gets more expensive.
Mazda has been doing aggressive leases – you just need to factor the buyout into your calculations if you plan to keep it beyond the lease term. The peace of mind having your kid in a reliable car is worth the investment, and at some point the cost of maintenance and repairs will dwarf a new lease payment. I spent almost $4k on repairs on my G37x last year – and that’s with me doing more than half the work at home, and the car probably lost $2k in value – this could have paid for a $500/month lease on a new car. This car had been really low maintenance for years, but has reached a point where I think several kilobucks a year may be needed to keep it going strong. It is worth doing some spreadsheet scenarios.
My wife wants a convertible, so something nice where the roof comes off. LC500s aren’t quite cheap enough yet, so maybe one of the last generation S class verts.
Notably there isn’t much new for ~$50K that I’m too interested in.
You’d be rolling the dice mechanically but V8 8 series convertibles can be had around that price. They’re elegant, refined, and offer the V8 open air motoring experience. You’re going to have to pay to keep them running but with how cheap they’re getting it’s becoming tempting to roll the dice.
Remember this comment, because I don’t say things like this often.
I’ve looked at 8 series, and if I bought one, it almost certainly would be the 840.
The power is still sufficient for a relaxed cruiser, and BMW is perhaps the only company that I can confidently say devotes more energy to making a good 6 than a good 8.
The B58 is one of the best internal combustion engines ever made. It’s shockingly efficient, sounds great for what it is, and it’s probably the most reliable German engine of this century. I will never fault anyone for foregoing a V8 in favor of the B58…especially since that 4.4 liter turbo mill has an extremely colorful history.
A B58 can also make an extra 100 horsepower on stock internals without much issue if it’s additional power you crave…but having driven multiple cars with it I personally think it’s just about right as is.
$50K will get you a nice E Class Cabriolet – S Class Cabrios are still more than $50K
I’d dig in the couch cushions for the extra $2K to get this one:
https://www.cars.com/vehicledetail/4fc912b5-e7f7-48c7-a519-06ed981e3b6f/
My wife would vote for the BMW convertible…hope it has a good warranty.
Not much new that interests me right now, but maybe a 2 door Bronco.
The ‘new’2 door bronco in that “guy pulls out stuck in snow for fun” post a little while back looked killer!
I would spend every dime on my 03 Civic Lx and 13 Civic Si, getting them in perfect condtion to last another 20+ years. You didn’t say I had to get new cars, and the ones I have will do nicely.
I just spend about 42K out the door for a 6-speed green manual 2022 tacoma TRD CPO with a 100k warranty. With my hypothetical remaining 8k I’ll buy another Triumph spitfire… (Because I have a problem)
Man, I wonder what the chances are it’s the lease Taco I turned in. TRD Off Road with everything.
Second owner got it at 26k miles, only drove it 2k miles in 2 months and traded it in on a tundra because the seats were so bad without seatjackers. Honestly, I would have too without the seatjackers.
If you handed me $50k and said buy a car, it would likely be a Lexus ES 300h. I’m tired of harsh rides over America’s crumbling infrastructure and trying to hear my music over the wind and tire noise. I want something with a comfortable ride, hushed interior, reputation for reliability, and good fuel economy.
Probably not an enthusiast pick, but that’s where I’m at as i age into my 50’s.
As someone with a 2022 Camry XSE Hybrid (platform mate to the ES), I like the way you think. Even though I’m nowhere near being in my 50’s, I spend way too much time driving for work rather than for pleasure to buy a car whose attributes I’ll only get to enjoy 20% of the time.
Gotta go for a Suzuki Cappuccino, and a Mazda Autozam Carol (in a fun color), then you said we had to spend it on cars, I choose to interpret that to allow for car parts, so my Eunos is getting lots of money thrown at it. Chassis braces, coilovers, wheels, full tan interior swap, new top…
For $50k I’d buy a rallycross car for like say $8k all in, like a Suzuki SX4 AWD manual hatch, then with that $42K, a manual 2 door Bronco?
Also Lutnick is a fucking moron
Ok quality ND1 Miata for around 17k, really nice V12 Century for 23k, and as much E36 Touring as I can get for the remaining 10k.
I like the way you think my friend!
88 Dodge Daytona Shelby Z
88 Chrysler Conquest
That should cover the 50k
As a previous owner of 2 ’87 Conquests and 1 ’88 Conquest I can say that you have excellent taste.
Daytona? The “sporty” k-car?!?
Heck yeah! The Wraith!!
Love for a Daytona is weirder to me than that person that loves Ford Tempos. Even at 17 (1997-ish) years old and having driven only a couple of cars I thought Daytonas didn’t deliver any of the performance their looks promised. All hat, no cattle.
I am sure it’d get a lot of eyeballs at Radwood, though. Whatever flips your switch.