Middle class income & new car prices

[Bull Run]

I haven't studied those 19th century recessions to understand why no debt was linked to them (or studied what else was going on at the time that would have had effect as well), but I can't believe that today's never-ending upward trend is a good thing either.

They weren't caused by lack of debt, the earlier one was caused by real-estate bubble popping and the latter one was due to switching to a gold standard that drove the money supply down, causing deflation. Sure, increasing government spending may mitigated some of the impact but it'll be far fetched to say they were caused by lack of debt.

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[Idaho2018GTPremium]

It's not just what people are doing with their money, it's about how the government regulates the manufacture of vehicles. Don't get me wrong, I think we should have safe vehicles, and there's no question survivability in automobile accidents has increased exponentially since Americans first started driving more than a century ago. But auto prices have increased dramatically since 1980 as government-mandated safety requirements have increased without a commensurate decrease in the fatality rate per 100,000 miles driven.

We could build a car that can absolutely guarantee zero deaths for any conditions under which the car may be driven, but very few could afford one. At some point you reach a point of diminishing returns along the safety/cost continuum. Maybe we've already passed it.

The link you provided shows the opposite of what you claim so I'm not following your logic. Your claim is that car death rates have not dropped commensurate with the newer, safer cars. However, the link you provided shows a chart that in 1969 the death rate per 100,000 people was 27.7. In 2013 it dropped to 11.2 per 100,000. That's a significant drop. I would imagine new cars today, with all the safety technology, are even safer. That said, the average car on the road is 10-11 years old, so the 2013 data includes many, many cars that were 10+ years old at the time. I would like to see the death rate data for cars 2016-current. I bet it is lower than the median rate of about 10-11 per 100,000, due to the national rate including cars averaging about 10 years old.

 

[Bikeman315]

The link you provided shows the opposite of what you claim so I'm not following your logic. Your claim is that car death rates have not dropped commensurate with the newer, safer cars. However, the link you provided shows a chart that in 1969 the death rate per 100,000 people was 27.7. In 2013 it dropped to 11.2 per 100,000. That's a significant drop. I would imagine new cars today, with all the safety technology, are even safer. That said, the average car on the road is 10-11 years old, so the 2013 data includes many, many cars that were 10+ years old at the time. I would like to see the death rate data for cars 2016-current. I bet it is lower than the median rate of about 10-11 per 100,000, due to the national rate including cars averaging about 10 years old.

Interesting that the average car life is increasing. I guess people have to hold onto them longer as the prices rise.

“Average vehicle age in the United States is expected to marginally grow between 2017 and 2019, with projections for the latter at 11.8 years. Two decades earlier, passenger cars had met the scrapper after about 10.3 years”.

Here are some numbers for 2018

There were 34,247 fatal motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2017 in which 37,133 deaths occurred. This resulted in 11.4 deaths per 100,000 people and 1.16 deaths per 100 million miles traveled. The fatality rate per 100,000 people ranged from 4.5 in the District of Columbia to 23.1 in Mississippi. The death rate per 100 million miles traveled ranged from 0.58 in Massachusetts to 1.80 in South Carolina.

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