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Americans can’t afford their cars any more and Wall Street is worried
(www.telegraph.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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politics
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My truck is 25 years old 139k miles and runs great. It will probably last another 80-100k and we just paid off my wife's car. We have no intention of taking on debt for a new vehicle unless it's necessary.
I'm round 250k miles on my car (admittedly, not American so it's actually a bit over 400k km) and it's not even the most kilometers I've had on a car.
Buy something with an engine and transmission that are known to last that doesn't have known rust issues, take care of it, and it will take care of you. You of course seem to have realized it already.
People literally rather sink themselves in debt to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars every few years than try to learn how to take care of their own vehicle internals or invest in the tools required to do so, despite being more accessible than ever. Seriously, you can diagnose your car with your phone with the right adapter. That would have seemed like magic when I was growing up.
Ohhh there are so many options here!
The app is often more important than the adapter at this point. Some marques have bad 3rd party app support unfortunately (looking at you, Subaru). Others have pretty great support (BimmerLink is adapter-agnostic, though they recommend using a high quality one and they have an affiliate deal of some kind with one manufacturer they recommend)
Personally I own a Chinese fake VCDS cable for <20 euros that allows me to do literal magic on anything VW, Audi, SEAT, Škoda... and could probably do a few things on modern Lamborghini and Bentley as well. Mysteriously, Porsche is the least supported out of all the VAG marques - they insist on having their own electronics. If I ever buy another VAG car, I'll probably buy a genuine adapter to support the company behind it. I also own a Chinese fake Delphi DS150E clone, but at this point I don't think it's as great as it was 5-6 years ago. It doesn't get cars newer than 2013. Plus it's still missing some crucial things on some cars between 2000 and 2013. And outright missing some models.
Then there's options like iCarsoft. More expensive than just an adapter and an app, but you get pretty great support for a lot of different marques. A lot more than some cheaper generic options.
And finally, marque-specific solutions. BimmerLink and VCDS I already mentioned, then there's GAP for Land Rover, etc. Worth investing in if you've got a car you're going to keep for a long time and want to be sure you can do stuff like air suspension ride height sensor calibration and all kinds of other procedures that generic tools might not have for your vehicle.
Yeah, why can't these people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps like you?
Just got my timing belt done, hoping to get to do it again at 200k miles