This is from the Wall Street Journal. I need to buy a new car now and this pretty much sums up how I feel about that:
No One Wants a New Car Now. Here’s Why.
Dan Neil
June 6, 2024
In the past, the average-age statistic was taken as a sign of transportation’s burden on household budgets. Those burdens remain near all-time highs. The average transaction price of a new vehicle is currently hovering around $47,000. While inflation and interest rates are backing away from recent highs, insurance premiums have soared by double digits in the past year.
Many buyers are now surfing on waves of vehicle depreciation, picking up used and off-lease cars and trucks still under warranty for thousands less than new. That’s smart. Your Dutch uncle approves. But lately another, stranger element is showing up in the numbers: a motivated belief among consumers that automakers’ latest and greatest offerings—whether powered by gasoline, batteries or a hybrid system—are inferior to the products they are replacing.
That’s different. Americans have been trained from a young age that the New is better than Old, especially coming from the car industry, the people who brought you tail fins, planned obsolescence and generous trade-in allowances. Who are these wild-eyed dissidents?
In fact, new-car deniers form a broad coalition of the unpersuaded. Some fear that new, digitally connected vehicles could expose their personal information to the Chinese—or worse, to their insurance agencies. Other modern marvels people seem eager to avoid include stop/start cycling systems, which shut off engines to save fuel when vehicles are stationary, now all but mandatory in new vehicles; continuously variable transmissions (CVTs), commonly found in compact vehicles with small-displacement engines; and diesel exhaust fluid (DEF), a post-combustion exhaust treatment that modern turbo diesel engines can’t live without.
Others are just trying to hang on to the good things they’ve got, like three-pedal stick-shifted manual transmissions, virtually extinct in new cars. Or built-in CD players. What unites them is the conviction that older cars are not just cheaper, but better—and that touch screens suck. We’ll circle back to that.
I cast a wide net on social media last month, posing this question: Name a new car/truck/SUV that is not as desirable as the design it replaces? I got back a long and distinguished list, a roll call of the compromised: Toyota Land Cruiser; Mini Cooper; Ford Mustang; Toyota Crown (née Avalon); Ford F-150; just about every model of BMW you can think of.
Ouch. As an industry watcher, I recognize this trend as something of an afterparty hangover. Whether the car-buying public has been aware of it, the past 30 years have been the best of times for automobiles and those who love them, an era when engineers had all the advantages of computer-assisted design and precision manufacturing while still wielding the primal force of combustion.
Those carefree, underregulated days are over. The past decade has seen carmakers retire large and thirsty V8s for smaller and more efficient V6s and even I4s, equipped with forced induction—typically involving one or two turbochargers and a daisy-chain of sensors, control modules and codeware. Many such power plants require premium fuel to work properly.
The regulatory hill for IC power only gets steeper from here. By 2032 gas-burning vehicles will need robust hybrid and plug-in hybrid systems in order for automakers to avoid noncompliance penalties. The number of potential failure points will grow dramatically. This is one of the many reasons I encourage consumers to jump to EVs and avoid the bitter end of combustion technology.
“It’s not just that my money doesn’t seem to stretch as far,” says Myles Leevy, of Los Angeles, the owner/driver of a 2011 Range Rover. “Any new car feels like it’s about two years away from becoming outdated.”
Lee Klancher, a publisher in Austin, Texas, loved the look of the 2024 Lexus GX550 SUV, powered by a sophisticated twin-turbo V6, but purchased a lightly used 2023 GX460, powered by a naturally aspirated V8. “The twin-turbo six and the fact it was a first-year model gave me pause,” he said. “The 23’s old-school tech means the bugs are ironed out.”
Some fans of the brand are “holding on to, or looking for, clean examples of the old GX with the V8 and SAT-NAV that works whether or not you can get a cell signal,” said Paul Williamsen, a product education manager for Lexus College based in Plano, Texas.
Change is hard, whether it’s under the hood or in the cabin. Used-car intenders reserve special loathing for the touch screen displays and capacitive switches that are now ubiquitous in new cars, regardless of price. The virtualization of once simple, reachable controls into phone-like menus has left many exasperated.
“I rented a brand new…Kia Sorento last week and it made me love my last-gen Tahoe that much more,” said John W. Lindsey, an attorney in Davis, Calif. “The UX completely confounded me to the point where it was more distracting than useful.”
“Recently my wife bought a new Toyota Highlander and it comes with a semester at MIT to learn the turn signal,” said Dan Barkin, a retired newspaper editor in Clayton, N.C.
For some the risk is the potential for eyes-off-the-road distraction. For others it’s an ineffable loss of affinity and connection, a charisma gap widening between analog and computerized automobiles. Speaking “as one of those grumpy old guys,” wrote Brock Yates Jr., organizer of the annual One Lap of America road race, “new vehicles are overladen with intrusive nannies and technologies designed for the lowest level of unskilled and distracted drivers, which sadly, seems to me most drivers we share the highways with.”
Some even refuse to call them cars. “They are tools that are reliable to move you physically but no longer emotionally,” said Bob Burns, an off-road driving instructor. “The excitement of a new car comes from how it can occupy you while you move from point A to B and relieve you from the arduous task of driving.”
Alas, charisma has been banished to the used-car lot. Automakers, under pressure to invest in EV manufacturing while also delivering reliable dividends, have slashed the diversity of models they offer, allowing them to focus on the most remunerative segments (pickups, SUVs and crossovers) while abandoning less profitable ones.
Only a generation ago, the new-car market was a zoonomia of kinky, affordable vehicles and body styles, such as the Honda Element and Scion xB. Now just try finding a family station wagon, a large sedan or a small pickup—a small anything, for that matter.
For their part, automakers have weighed these discontents and decided they were not worth addressing. Take touch screen displays. With the rise of GPS mapping and mobile communications in the early part of the century, consumers demanded connected-car features and services. As soon as they got them it became clear they were going to need help coping with the driver distraction and cognitive load.
Thus were born advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS) such as automatic lane-keeping, emergency braking and blind-spot detection. Along the way, many aspects of cars’ driving character—including suspension, transmission and stability control—became configurable. These are bells that can’t be unrung.
“If I were to put a button for everything, the cabin would look like an old 747,” Maserati’s global head of design Klaus Busse told The Drive magazine in a recent interview.
And besides, he might have added but didn’t, touch screens are cheaper.
