New cars lose a lot of value driving off the lot. That hasn't changed. Odd you think it has and that they keep value now.

The economy already recovered. Odd you didn't know that, since you include comments about the economy. You don't care enough to follow the subject, but you cite it?

If the newer car has side-impact airbags, it will have a much higher safety rating. If not, then it won't have a higher rating than a 5, 10, or often 15 yo car, which are new enough to have modern crumple zones and front airbags. You can't lean on the average crash ratings, you have to actually compare real cars at real price points. You'll find that "regular-priced" cars had a big safety jump ~1995, and then it depends on the specific model after that. A 10 yo Prius is going to have better crash safety than many larger cars, for example.

I drive a 16 yo minivan with ~125,000 miles and it is basically "like new" from a practical perspective. It did once have a plugged fuel injector, a dead battery, and a small hose leak. The hoses were ready for scheduled replacement anyway, and the battery was 6 years old. The injector cost $65 to replace, and I was still able to drive it slowly. New cars can get plugged injectors, too. It was plugged the next day after driving 250 freeway miles with 30 city miles and frequent stops in the middle of that, on a hot day. That happens at any age.

It may sound old to some people, but it has electronic throttle control; all I have to do is floor the pedal and I'll accelerate right on the power curve automatically, no wasted revving. Works great with a $12 bluetooth ODB-II reader, too; I can view all the engine info from a smart phone. Any replacement part can be easily obtained from chain parts stores. Any repair or diagnostic will have a youtube walk-through. Not that it breaks down.

The anti-slip does both anti-lock and also anti-slide on ice, with the same processors. It is front wheel drive, but I can drive over a solid sheet of ice and slam on the brakes and stop in a few feet. If there is 8" of powdery snow that slowly forms an ice layer and eventually turns to slush over 2 weeks, I can drive during every stage of that, with regular tires, and never slide around; even freeway on/offramps are fine on ice-covered with powder. I slide a tiny bit, but control is maintained during any slide, so I'll slide a couple inches and correct. All because of a tiny microcontroller in each brake.

I'd love cruise control that can match speeds when behind somebody without cruise control, but that is luxury stuff. There is not much at all that a new car could offer that my used car doesn't already do and isn't available after-market. If my car was 5 years older, I'd have a giant laundry-list of desired features, most of them related to the computers and interfaces.

If you think people are tired of insurance payments, try getting it on the ballot to lower the insurance requirements. It will fail, and then you can re-evaluate how people feel about car insurance. ;)

Hint: if you think car ownership is a major financial hit, you're really really poor, or bought a car that is expensive to maintain. If that is the biggest waste of money you have, you don't have much money, or are very efficient with it.

My counter-advice to young people: Never buy a new car unless you have enough money to consider it a "toy." Don't buy the cheapest used car, either, it will cost you more. Buy a mid-priced used car built after 1996 or so if you think you need one. When driverless cars with manufacturer-paid insurance show up, that will be the time to consider a new car as a long-term investment.

While I don't agree with Mr Coward's conclusion, that is a pretty severe straw man. Not everybody buys a car that way, and there is no reason to assume that a person who values ownership must have bought a car on credit.

You can buy a cheaper new car for 2 months of income at the median income level. Even a tiny bit of savings is enough to buy a used car for cash.

If you can't afford to pay cash for a quality used car, you can't afford the down-payment for a home loan either. There was a zero-down window during the bubble, but that is long gone.

If you go by the 30-year price curve instead of the 10-year, then there is little fear of things crashing down. It smooths out the ~15 year cycles. If the paper appreciation is higher than the expected 30-year, just use the 30-year curve number in your head and then if things "crash" you can just say, "it only came down to the price I expected it to land at. I wasn't ready to sell during the bubble."

When I lived in Portland we shopped at Whole Foods for fish, and a few other items. They have the best labeling anywhere. Yes, it was more expensive.

And no, the specialty cheese shop will be much, much cheaper. And more likely, across town, in regular priced real estate instead of the convenient and expensive location that Whole Foods purchased. I do eat a lot of cheese, I know this one! lol

There isn't anything at WF that is cheaper than other stores that carry like items. However, it has a lot of items in one place that otherwise would be at different specialty stores. That said, most shoppers will find everything they buy at WF at Trader Joes for 20%+ less money, and often higher quality. But there is no fresh fish.

On the west coast, there are a variety of stores that offer these types of higher-quality items without the extra premium that WF charges. Yes, better products are more expensive, but that doesn't mean any high price is just the item cost. In places without a strong health-food culture, WF might be the only game in town for things like organic fair trade cocoa in a glass jar; on the west coast you can actually find that almost anywhere. WF will have all the trendy (mass-produced) European brands, though; regular health-food stores will have more small American brands, and maybe not any mass-produced imports. The same brand is always higher priced at WF than at a family health-food store or regional chain.

It doesn't have to be very high density. It just has to be dense enough that young people can do daily travel by bicycle or public transit. Any community with a decent bus line is ripe for car-sharing, because there will be lots of working class people who are physically strong who don't want to own cars because of the expense. It is a huge convenience for these people to be able to rent a car at reasonable hourly rates once in awhile. And no, it isn't a nice clean sedan and a fixed schedule; fixed schedules are served by public transit in that scenario. A person so used to buying luxury would just own a car. ;) It is non-fixed schedules that benefit.

And no, it isn't for people on-call who might be quickly summoned, either. If that person uses a car-share, they're probably bicycling to work already and the car is for recreation on off days, or distant infrequent errands.

Honestly, based on your comment I doubt anybody in your whole neighborhood is going to use this service. ;)

Yeah, people who haven't done the math don't understand the tradeoffs. Buying costs a lot more at the start. You don't get it back until the very end of the process. If you plan to live in the house until you die, there is a good chance that the "savings" are entirely extra value you have to pass on, not actual money you have in your own hand. Unless you sell, you might still have spent more by owning than you would be renting.

And most people have much lower income when they make their down payment than they do at the end when they have it paid off. For a lot of people, if they had rented another 10 years, they would have had more disposable income during that time, and then later when their income is higher they could buy the same house and still have surplus income.

Unless you expect to have flat income your whole life, the reason to buy earlier isn't to save money, it is to be able to covet the property. Mine mine mine. Mine.

I guess I'll just have to build a house and stay here with it, then. Thanks for the tip!

You're right of course, but another combination that works with a fuel cell instead of a battery is a small flywheel for acceleration. Assuming that you charge the flywheel to slow down, instead of braking, it is nearly free. It won't give you a sportscar, but it can be enough to overcome the steadiness of the fuel cell output to allow normal driving.

Even if you also assume that the near future will have more efficient hydrogen generation, it still sucks; if there was a hydrogen sea to pump it out of, you'd still be stuck under 60% efficiency to get the ions into the tank. You can't just pour it in like gas, it takes energy to encourage the chemical reaction that gets the ions into the metal.

When the size and weight come down, I do expect them to be a good choice for long-haul shipping. They will probably beat batteries for electric aircraft eventually, too. The fuel cell itself can be designed as a functional part of the frame. If you don't have to count the metal in the cell, or at least you can subtract the aluminum it displaces, then the density improves a lot. For a passenger car that isn't a benefit nearly as soon, because there is limited weight going towards strength; weight and safety are from crumple zones and that is not a good candidate for replacement because there would be different performance when full or empty. The frame itself is not all that heavy.

Your silly hand-waving isn't stopping companies from offering the service, or communities from creating special parking zones usable by commercially-marked shared vehicles...

If you're curious who offers the service, just find a website like car2go.com there is no need to invent imaginry ebil libraaaaaaaals that only exist on cable news, AM radio, and the minds of their fans.

I also use up valuable real estate to store an emergency kit full of items that I'll most likely never use.

And in my minivan it isn't just an extra jacket, (no, a couple jackets don't really add up to much) but 2 axes and a shovel. Required to have in the vehicle in order to drive on forest service or BLM roads during fire season. I probably use an extra gallon of gas by the end of the year carrying those around.

Those who can't imagine living a life where you have emergency equipment (like blankets) ready... are probably young and poor.

Heck, take you for example: you can't even afford a free registration!

Your idea that suburban cars collect personal items at a different rate than urban cars is hilarious.

But you're right that the model can be easily adopted. And has been. They are all over town now. You just walk up and wave your credit card at the reader under the driver side windshield. Very popular with young people.

Not a problem really. With a small flywheel for in-town, it does pull to the side a bit when you engage, but not worse than wind, and people adjust to it easily.

The real problem regarding the forces are the accident danger. If you crash it can really tear your car apart.

My friend had flywheel assist before he went electric. That was in the early 90s. Trust me, the reason you don't see it around very often isn't because of viability concerns; mostly cost/result/accident danger. It is expensive to install, uses up limited space, and isn't a miracle at all.

Yes.

As far as efficiency, you fell on your face. Sorry man. The 35% for the car is the engine. That's the max possible, real IC engines in consumer cars are closer to 25%. Your novel idea that that is higher than electric cars get is funny, but no. Also, battery charging using the battery technologies already used in cars is closer to 85% in the worst case, and over 90% average. Nobody is building cars with lead acid. And "battery discharge" is not 75%, the average is over 90%. 75% is the lowest efficiency, which you get briefly at the end of the cycle when the battery is already charged and you're only using a tiny bit of current to top it off. The main part of the charge that uses most of the power is at the higher end of the efficiency range for the battery. You're whacking battery efficiency down twice with made-up numbers and pretending to be science-y.

Battery charging efficiency is actually near 100% below 70% charge. Remember, you're not doing much work here, physically. There is no reason to desire there to be an extra loss here. ;) Discharge loss is also normally only a few percent, not 25%. Almost all the losses in your "equation" are from made-up numbers that are nowhere close to reality.

Fuel cell storage efficiency is only 20-60%. No surprise, because hydrogen atoms are larger than electrons, and so filling up the cell requires vastly more physical work.

Flywheels are super-heavy. The funny part about what you say there is that small flywheels used the same way as electric regenerative braking can increase fuel efficiency in a city, with frequent start/stop, but the mass of flywheel you'd need to be useful at a 50+ mile range would be really heavy, and have huge friction losses. It can be done, it has been done, but you get a slow tank that is inefficient, not a fuel-saver.

Not having better numbers is no excuse for just making them up as if a guess what you use when you can't be bothered to look any of it up, and don't already know about the technologies.