I suspect you are kidding, but during the oil crisis I was scratching my head at all the people dumping their SUVs for pennies on the dollar and buying fuel efficient cars.
I ran the numbers and found that for most SUV buyers, the step up in mileage to a miser was worth $5,000 to $7000 over 100,000 mile service life. The total cost of gas is much higher, but the premium paid to drive the SUV over the miser was some $6,000 on average. Yet most of these people were trading or selling SUVs for as much as $10,000 below former street value.
Except for those with say 2 hour commutes, all those fools lost their asses by selling low. And all the while I knew oil prices were unsustainable, so while they were down $2,000 or $3,000 selling the SUV at $4/gallon gas, it would be even worse after a return to $3/gallon gas. Fools.
I can understand replacing a 10 year old SUV with a miser, or promising to buy a fuel miser in the future, but very foolish to sell a paid for, comfy, safe big SUV for a loss when for most, the loss is higher than the premium paid for bad mileage over the remaining service life of the SUVs.
And just yesterday I wrote on another post that most people, despite knowing to buy low and sell high, generally do the opposite because greed, fear and other emotions push out logic. The SUV owners who dumped their SUVs for $10,000 below value to save $6,000 over the remaining life of their nearly new SUVs bought high and sold low. Not very bright...
Agreed!!
“
I suspect you are kidding, but during the oil crisis I was scratching my
head at all the people dumping their SUVs for pennies on the dollar
and buying fuel efficient cars.
“
Some folks really did make irrational moves based on a staightforward
dollars-and-cents analysis.
But I suspect that some of those moves were based on fear...of the
“what-ifs” if the price of oil/gas/diesel kept climbing (however unlikely).
They were probably afraid of where they’d been if we’d actually ended
up with gas at $10-$12 per gallon.
And looking “across the pond”, they know that $10/gallon fuel
does exist in part of the civilized world.