I saw this post and wanted to ask the opposite. What are some items that really aren’t worth paying the expensive version for? Preferably more extreme or unexpected examples.

  • @nixcamic
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    4 months ago

    That site is geo-blocked in my region so I have no idea what it says but I’d just like to point out that

    A: the USA actually exports a huge number of used cars so the average life of a car sold in the US will actually be longer than the average age of a car in the US.

    And B: without a significant number of cars way older than 20 years old, there’s no way for the average age to be 12 years old and only 24% be over 20 years old. So a bunch of that 24% have got to be 50-60 years old. Either one of the stats are wrong or a significant portion of cars are lasting way longer than either of us were guessing.

    Also you can appreciate the experience more just because of the aesthetics of a product. This is a well documented phenomenon. If it’s not your thing fine, not everyone has to like the same things. I find for example fancy dinner sets to be ridiculous. Doesn’t mean that I think people who own them are dumb for liking them. I have friends who break out their grandmother’s china for Thanksgiving. I’d never do that but it makes them happy so good on them.

    Edit: whoever wrote that blog post really doesn’t want any darned foreigners reading it. They not only block non American IP addresses, but also Archive.org, VPN addresses, and Google cache.

    • @[email protected]
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      14 months ago

      Here’s the link on archive.org.

      A: That may be but I doubt that huge number is significant relative to the approx. 280 million vehicles currently registered in the US or even the approx. 12 million new cars sold each year, so it is basically a rounding error. I looked here and it mentions America exporting about 2.5 million cars between 2015 and 2018, so between 600k and 800k per year, so that’s about 6% as many as the new cars sold each year. So yes, that might change things by a percent or two either way.

      B: Sorry, but that isn’t how statistics (or averages) work. If you work out the numbers in that link, and weight the numbers for the bracket that includes 12 years, you get either 37% or 56% are under 12 years. So it’s definitely possible for it to be 12 years. If you draw a curve based on these numbers you will notice a fairly sharp rise, then a long tail, with 12.3 being just past the peak. That gives a lot of cars between 12 and 20 years, leading to the averages we’re seeing.