Pretty much everything is an expense, even mortgages, most of the time. The liberal use of the word "investment" in America is irksome. Marketing has hijacked our minds.
Honestly a car can been seen as an investment in the classic sense. If you buy a car for its utility, i.e. to help you get to work or otherwise be more productive, you will get a return you may not have been able to otherwise. Of course most people spend way too much or buy cars they don't need, so the return can be terrible.
This is true, but the value of your car plays an important role in that expense. And expected depreciation is an important factor to consider when buying a car.
That's only if you intend to sell it for more than scrap value some day.
Any car I buy is getting sold to the junkyard for $500 in 10+ years and 200k+ mi. How steeply it's paper value declines between now and then doesn't matter much to me.
True. And in all reality, this is great for consumers and bad for holders of inventory.
There's a tendency among people in business to mark everything to market. This helps avoid otherwise hidden losses but it doesn't actually make sense in some situations. For example, in the case of a family that owns two cars and replaces one every five years.
Ha! Good luck with that. Scrapped cars are down to like $60/ton.
It seems reasonable that the scrap steel and used car markets would be correlated... If self-driving cars cause a drop in car ownership, it will be a good time to figure out a previously-uneconomical use of steel.
