It’s Wednesday, so that means it’s time for another The Autopian Podcast and today’s podcast has us answering your questions. We’ve got David in Australia struggling with Project Cactus, Beau in Vietnam driving the newest VinFast cars, and Jason in North Carolina being boring, I guess. Plug in your airpods and feeding tube, it’s mailbag time!
Today was our first attempt at a mailbag wherein we answer the questions that you have. It’s a fairly simple concept. There were a bunch of good queries, but this one stood out to me:
Fellas, talk to me about when I’ll know it is time to sell a vehicle I just use as an appliance for transportation. What am I watching out for or what milestones should I not pass before the value plummets to DT noticing it? Assume I have other fun vehicles so no sentimentality.
— Walter McÏnnis (@McWalt) September 21, 2022
What’s interesting here is that, rather than get into the details of when a car is at the sweet-spot for the depreciation/car repair curve, Beau brings his experience as a dealer to explain why the time to sell is probably now.
Beau’s reasoning is that there’s such a shortage of used cars that basically anything has some kind of value. Nothing in the market is really a deal. If you can trade it in, you should trade it in. The caveat there is that it’s gotta be an extra car you can part with and, of course, you may not get a great deal on something new. If you were looking for an excuse to daily your track-prepped Miata, you just got it.
There are some interesting model year cliffs in value as well, which Beau does a better job of explaining than I can.
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