Saturday, January 1, 2011

Car Dealers Don't Realize There's a Recession On

I was out looking for used cars with my son, whose Pontiac Sunfire did not survive a taxi collision in Portland several months back.  There has always been a bit of gap between what dealers charge for used cars, and private parties, but that gap seems to have grown to enormous proportions--probably because of the financing that dealers have available.  I was startled to see a Mitsubishi SUV with 171,000 miles on it that had a $4900 price tax.  Even a Chevy TrailBlazer with about 140,000 miles was $3900.  Cars last longer than they used to, but still, these are astonishing prices.

2 comments:

  1. That is one of the legacies of the "Cash for Clunkers" program.

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  2. Hmmm ... that could be true, if those who privately sell their used cars haven't yet noticed or accepted the increase in prices and if they are sufficiently disjoint from those who normally supply used cars to the dealers and who probably made up the bulk of the cars destroyed in the program.

    What an illustration of the broken window fallacy!

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