Cars and owners

When I went to buy a new car, to replace the aging horse that had served me well, I, like most Americans did not buy it cash down.  To get the loan approved, I had to get my credit checked.

The sales guy came back with the print out.  He had a huge smile on his face.

He sat down on this chair across from me, and slid the paper across and pointed to the credit score.

I asked him what that meant.

I remember his reply even now, almost a year later: "It means you can buy whatever you want at the best rates. That good."

But, of course, the party-pooping General Malaise that I am, I never buy whatever I want. 

Most Americans typically behave the other way around.  Despite their less-than-awesome credit histories, and not saving for the rainy days and years, they buy.  They buy big, and lots of it.  So much so that:

Car debt has risen 75 percent since the Great Recession in 2009, reaching an all-time high of $1.2 trillion, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

This is a worrisome piece of statistic.  It is a danger sign because "car buyers could run into trouble if the economy takes a turn for the worse and their income drops, especially because they’re locking themselves into long-term loans."

Consumers did a similar thing before the Great Recession--they bought homes that they could not really afford, betting that there will not be any downturn in the economy.  And when the economic conditions took a dive, well, you know what happened!

As the global economy seems to be slowing down, one should take a note of this: "More than 7 million Americans are now at least three months delinquent on their auto loan payments, the benchmark for many lenders to trigger a repossession."

Imagine if the economy contracts over the next few months.  Jobs will be cut.  Paychecks will decrease.  But, the payments have to be made.  Or else.

The silver lining, if at all, is this:

The market for car loans is just a fraction of the size of the one for houses. “This isn’t going to be the next 2008,” said R.J. Cross, a policy analyst at the Frontier Group, a research think tank that co-authored the U.S. PIRG report. But these trends still spell trouble for individuals and families, and point to an enlarged economy pumped full of bad loans.

But, seriously, why can't people buy well within their affordable range?  They don't have to be General Malaise, but at least Major Buzzkill or, heck, even Captain Killjoy, right?

Teenagers won't dream of cars anymore?

I was perhaps ten years old when my parents--ahem, my father, given that he made most of the budget decisions--decided that the old car would not work with the new sky-high petrol prices.  The family joke is that my younger brother refused to walk, having been spoiled by the car.

The car meant something back then.  I remember Holden Caulfield commenting in The catcher in the rye that people are always dreaming of their next cars--even when they drive out of the dealer in their new car!  And that continues even now.  I seem to make my own stories about people based on the type of cars they drive.  Even the car that I drive has a reputation for the owners being dull, boring, careful, and everything else along those lines.

In the future that is arriving, cars might not mean a damn thing.  Think about the science fiction movies that you may watched.  Not the science fiction of a gazillion years from now, but set in the near-future.  Recall how boring the transport mechanisms are in those movies?  They are boxy and utilitarian. That's it.  There is no art, there is no story, no life about those transport units.

This essay, by a chair-professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, argues that cars will never be sexy again.  With developments like Uber and self-driving cars, "the automotive logic of the 20th century—“cars as luxury, cars as freedom, cars as sex”" has been turned upside down.

cars are becoming leased appliances, made and sold with efficiency to suppliers intent on renting them out for minutes at a time to customers who would rather forget ever having been inside them. Nothing could be less sensual than the boring universe of business-to-business fleet sales—except, maybe, the boring universe of business-to-business fleet-sales component supply.

I suppose the boring future will be another version of Henry Ford's line that any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.

When that future arrives, there is one thing that I will miss most in this part of the world--the bumper stickers.  Some vehicles have awesome statements in their bumper stickers, including those that I disagree with, of course.  Once I saw one of those huge pick-up trucks with a bumper-sticker with an arrow pointing to the exhaust pipe.  The sticker read "Your Prius can suck on this."  The other day I saw a small car with stickers all over the bumper, the rear frame, and half of the sides as well.  That kind of a personalization won't be there in the future?  It will be a boring future even for this dull and boring guy!

My favorite bumper-sticker had truly my kind of humor.  What was in the sticker?  "I hate bumper stickers!" ;)

Driving a car: are you really in control?

Chart of the day: GM's vehicle production

Public subsidy: transit versus cars

The following two are typical arguments from the two camps (well, we live in a binary world. so, nothing in the middle!)

From the (moderate) left, Daniel Gross:
Naturally, many urban-dwelling, car-hating socialists (as well as suburban-dwelling, Jeep-driving moderates like me) believe this is precisely the time to put more government funds—not less—into alternate modes of transportation: natural-gas powered buses, bicycle-sharing programs, trains, light-rail systems, subways, ferries, and rickshaws. The notion that the government should invest more in mass-transit infrastructure has always raised conservative hackles.

From the right, Peter Gordon:
Robert Reich is a public intellectual, interviewed in today's NY Times by Deborah Solomon. Among his responses is this: "... public transit has been the poor child of infrastructure spending in America."This is beyond silly and easy to check. The quickest check is at Demographia, where Reich and others can find that in 2006 road and highway subsidies per passenger mile were $0.010 while transit subsidies per passenger-mile were $0.686. These are averages. At the margin, we build rail transit that gets much bigger subsidies.Outsized and ineffectual transit subsidies have been in effect for over 40 years. Most politicians and reporters don't care and neither do many public intellectuals.