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More Than 1 in 5 New Car Buyers in the U.S. Are Taking Out Loans of 84 Months or Longer
(www.roadandtrack.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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I guarantee you can go on Craigslist for your area right now and find cars that run for like $1k or less.
Probably all hoopdie ass shitboxes, but wait a couple months and keep an eye and you'll find something that runs from the 2000s that's not a total piece of shit for like $3k, with around 300-350k miles.
Are they great? No. Cheap as hell to insure? Yes. Cost the same price as 5 months of a car payment, and last for years with basic maintenance costs and worse gas mileage? Very likely yes.
Some people don’t have the time and money to drop $1,000 on a car that may not run for long and look for another car that’s more affordable.
I’m just saying it’s really expensive to be poor.
Bull. I still have most of the cars I bought for $3000 and they still run. You sound inept.
I'm done with this guy. 8 day old account, I'm thinking troll or idiot, unsure which, but either way not worth any time.
Ok?
In the post I replied to you said you can't find used cars for less than 10k.
Now you're saying people are too time/money poor to buy a $1k car, which is true for some, but that's way different than your last point.
At some point you're too poor to buy a car, and that sucks. Not sure how cheap people expect a 2000lb hunk of engineered metal, glass, and a combustion engine that can propel you 300 miles should be, but I think $1k is cheap for that and it sucks if you can't buy it. Either way.
But sitting here and complaining that the cheapest car you can find is $10k in your area is dumb, because what that tells me is all you're doing is going to look at nice stuff at carvana or CarMax.
You’re missing the overall conversation as to why people are opting to buy new cars and opting for really bad loan terms to focus on small details.
There’s many reasons people are opting to buy new and one of them is how much more expensive used cars have become especially since Covid.