Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn’t been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.
Yeah, it’s very much YMMV. I got a Prius for ~$10k w/ <60K miles about 10 years ago, and new models were going for >2x that (I think MSRP was ~$25k). It now has 145k miles and has needed practically no repairs (maybe $2k?). So at the time, used was absolutely a better deal.
Today, a similar car would go for >$20k, and MSRP is similar ($28k-ish). So today, buying new is absolutely a better deal, if I can get it for MSRP (pretty big if these days).
So if I can get more than half of the useful life for significantly less than half of MSRP, used makes a ton of sense. But that’s not really a thing today. Had I bought new when I bought my car, I could probably get $20k+ for it today. I didn’t, so I can only really get $5k or so, but that’s still a great deal given that I put on nearly 100k miles over ~10 years.
I plan to drive my car until it dies, so I’m basically saving $15k or so buying used. If I bought today though, I’d buy new because used doesn’t make financial sense to me.
Toyotas and Hondas have pretty huge markups right now. A new Prius for example (in Texas at least) costs 39k (with taxes and everything) for the base trim.
I’m seeing advertisements for MSRP for both Prius and Civic, so ~$30k for 2023 model years for base trim. This is before taxes, just advertised price, so maybe $35k out the door after taxes, registration, fees, etc.
That said, I haven’t requested a quote from any local dealers, so those advertised prices could be unrealistic. But advertised prices are down from last year.
I went in person last month to two dealerships in my area, and they both had over 5k markups.
They also stated ~30k on their website.
Lame. It’s at least better than a year ago when everything was marked up >$10k.