I like asking friends who grew up rich what small things about their lives were different. I asked one whether any of his friends had crappy cars.
“Not really. Maybe one.”
He meant an older Honda Civic.
I meant a car where more than two of the doors or windows don’t open, or one you can’t take on the highway.
Another friend told me he wouldn’t know where to get a $5,000 car.
Everyone knows there’s cultural knowledge in elite circles. How to get your kid into a good college. How to pass a consulting or finance or Google interview.
There’s just as much cultural knowledge to being in the bottom two quintiles. I see it written about much less.
How to buy a good car for $1000
When a car is on its last legs, we start asking around. Someone might know someone moving away or upgrading. The best case is a friend or a friend of a friend. They won’t sell a lemon.
A fellow waitress was selling hers for $1000 when she moved. That 15-year-old car lasted my dad five years.
You go outside the network if you need a car quickly. Or when you want a cute one, like I did.
For my first car, we went to the part of town where there are a lot of mechanic shops. The lots sell cars from $1,500 to $10,000 and sometimes junkers for parts. A friend of my grandmother’s, Mario, ran one of these.
My parents wanted me to buy a $2,000 Honda Civic. I splurged on a $3,000 car I thought was cuter. I was sixteen and paying with my own earnings.
There was no bank loan or credit check. We paid Mario directly in installments.
My parents knew how to judge cars at this price, and we had a trusted contact. That’s the same combination that gets well-off kids their summer internships.
What “crappy” means
Status still exists here. My dad always had a Mercedes. The $1,000 car was a Mercedes. But you focus your buying research on how well the car runs.
There’s no depreciation left to worry about. We keep the car until the repairs cost more than the car.
To me, these cars are not crappy.
Reasons not sufficient to sell the car because the car’s not crappy:
The back door only unlocks from the inside. Get in from the other side.
A door doesn’t lock. El Paso is safe and there’s nothing in the car to steal. The other doors lock.
The lining inside the door comes loose and hangs. Glue will fix this. This is cosmetic.
Does it run? Can you take it on the freeway? You’re good.
My $3,000 car eventually became crappy. It started overheating erratically enough to sometimes make me late for class, but not bad enough to replace it.
A car becomes crappy when the annoyance becomes constant.
Nobody I knew judged anyone on how a car looked. I didn’t feel unprivileged.
What I notice now
When I hear someone call a car crappy because it doesn’t look nice, I’m surprised. It means they don’t know many people driving cars at their 15-year mark.
Most cities have a busy market of $1,000 to $6,000 cars. I’d guess the bottom two quintiles, about 40% of Americans, depend on it.
If you keep that market in mind, a lot of debates look different.
New car prices going up is middle-class life getting squeezed.
Car debt is terrible. But many people can’t get car debt, because many banks won’t write a $3,000 car loan, much less to someone with unsteady income. The bottom quintile often can’t even reach the $1,000 car - it’s hard to get out of the cycle where you can’t get a job because you don’t have a car.
When people wave off Waymo or bus lanes or bike lanes because car culture is fine, they mean it works fine for them.
Policy interacts with this car market mostly by accident. In 2009 the U.S. government offered around $4,000 to scrap a car, as long as it was functional, insured, and registered. About 690,000 usable cars were destroyed. The money went to higher-income people for whom a $4,000 car is a car “at the end of its life”. The program took supply out of the market that people below them buys in. The program appears to have raised prices of the oldest used cars.
You can only protect what you can see.
Mario chose to focus on cars that cost below $8,000. My mom, dad, aunt, and uncle all bought from him. He was from Ciudad Juárez, like them.
He could have sold $12,000 cars. That’s what the lot shifted to after he passed away. My dad never went back.
Other car lots focus on the cheaper range, but they often run on relationships. Those take time.
For a few thousand people in El Paso, one man deciding to sell cheap cars for years was community infrastructure.
That’s the problem with a market you can’t see. Big impacts on it looks like nothing happening. I’m only understanding it now, and I grew up in it.
Interesting piece that shows just how stratified society is. I would never buy a new car, but it's almost as hard for me to imagine buying a sub $5000 dollar car.
I wonder if part of what makes being downwardly mobile so stressful is the lack of cultural knowledge. If your father is a lawyer and you become a barista, you don't have the network or tools needed to survive on that income. Thanks for writing it!
The strategy that was hot in Memphis, which I used multiple times, was to buy trap cars that had been impounded by police (sometimes due to direct involvement in a crime, but more often due to cumulative unpaid tickets or because the plates had been ditched). Almost by definition the performance had to be there, and they had to be in good exterior shape to avoid getting pulled over for compliance. Bought my first ride (a '94 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme 2-door w/tinted windows that were honestly kind of baller) for $800. Lasted me all through college.