US car repossessions surge as more Americans default on auto loans

> The value of the dollar has already plummeted, 10% or so this year.

Compared to what? From Nov 3, 2024: the USD against:

GBP (3)%

JPY (1.7)%

EUR (6.7)%

INR 4.6%

AUD 1.3%

CAD .74%

RMB .4%

The EUR (if that is what you are going by) is unusually strong, and that's actually starting to cause issues. But the dollar isn't "collapsing".

It's probably much higher than that in reality if you look at assets spiking compared to the dollar. Gold is going completely parabolic right now. Real estate shows no signs of slowing down. Crypto (regardless of your opinion of it) is spiking as people try to store value anywhere besides the dollar. We hear about the AI bubble propping up equity markets all the time but I always wonder how much of it is just investors desperately converting dollars into anything else with a bit of liquidity.

The high end seems to be wildly out of control. We have $trillion+ companies now, and we are likely to see the world's first individual USD trillionaire within the next 12 months.

All of them: https://www.fool.com/investing/2025/10/17/ionq-rgti-qbts-qub...

It makes no fucking sense for any of these to be trading above $10.

I think to be above the curve requires being the first to receive the freshly printed money to buy more assets before they inflate further. You need to be first to benefit... So grift off the government contracts that lead/cause more printing.

There's been some development in crowd control, no? AI and robots will make this even better.

DISREGARD YOUR PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS AND JOIN THE REBELS

Historically, it did not. What actually does lead to revolution is regime becoming weak and unable to organize. You can keep people in horrible conditions and there will be no revolution, because dissenters will get stopped long before they anywhere near organizing themselves.

It is when the powerful become the weak that revolution can happen. And it takes more then one round of it till reasonable government emerges again.

>Historically, this has ultimately led to revolutions.

Which is why they've spent the last 50 years pitting the lower classes against themselves with meaningless culture wars. In a world with F-16s, Apache helicopters, and panopticon digital surveillance, there will never be armed revolution again (nor would anyone actually want that); the only option is nonviolent resistance. But it'll never happen in the US since we have zero class solidarity, and are all just temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

The problem with old junkers is that if you don’t have the money in cash, how do you fix a major car repair? You can get a loan for a new car with money.

The car “generates income” because it allows you to get to work and hopefully make more than your car note.

The standard recommendation of taking out sent so you can invest your money and "make it work for you" frustrates me to no end.

Yes, on paper I can accrue more wealth if I mortgage my house and invest that same amount elsewhere. No, I would not trade owning a house outright for having a house that will be taken from me if I can no longer pay, strict insurance requirements, and a pile of someone else's debt that I call money and ignore the risk implied in investing in someone else's gamble.

It’s not ridiculous, it’s how the whole system works. People need to live their lives, and if they only way they can get around (or throw a birthday party, or have a funeral, or some other human thing) is to borrow money, they borrow money. Which in turn props up a huge proportion of the businesses that make up the economy.

Americans finance things to keep up imagery.

This country is insanely ego and pride focused or fixated.

Capitalism exploits this in advertising.

Americans throw money at everything and then wonder why they're broke.

Or in the case of cars, people finance a new car and throw money at repairs instead of doing what folks like you and I do. Buy a reliable older car that's cheap to work on. But that takes "learning" and most Americans are convinced that learning is a waste of time, just throw money at the problem.

> Outside of housing

> Outside of what makes it more expensive for virtually everyone, it is actually cheaper

>America literally the country with longest average and median commutes to work? Like, that was always an American thing - the long commute.

Miles? probably.

Time, lower than a lot of europe IIRC.

Locally to me, it’s pretty uncommon for any mechanics, tire shops, etc. to give any sort of timeline for any sort of service.

I recently had a 1-hour job done on my car - the only appointment my local mechanic takes is for a specific date - you drop off first thing in the morning, and they call you when they’re done.

I also just called my local tire shop to enquire about mounting/balancing (but not installing) tires - they don’t take appointments for that, but also don’t guarantee any particular speed of service - you drop off your tires, and they call you when they’re done, whether it’s that day or the next.

Or just do it yourself. At least oil changes can be done entirely oneself with a very small number of non-specialized tools. You don't even need a house with a garage, you can do it in your driveway or even on the street if you only have street parking.

As others have pointed out, tires are somewhat more complicated, but not entirely out of the realm of the home shade tree mechanic, if you're willing to invest in a few specialized tools/fixtures.

It's not that it takes all day to do the work. It's that you get to your "appointment" and they really haven't set aside any time for you. You're just put in line like the next walk up guy.

I keep seeing this argument but I think about whats broken in my ice over the years: brakes, control arms, struts, suspension springs. You get a pass on gearbox but as a genuine question, do these usual mechanical problems that have nothing to do with the engine jist not happen on EVs?

It's a real bitch with spoons.

Tire machines from china are getting better and cheaper all the time, but balancers are still expensive.

First you have to get big bulky tires delivered to wherever you're going to install them on to your wheel rims. Then you need equipment to remove the old tires from your rims, and install the new ones on the rims. Next you need to balance the tires, then you need to take care of all the TPMS components. After this you need to mount your tires. Forget something? Too bad your car is out of commission til all the above is done.

Usually it involves swapping the new tires onto the rims. It's not easy to do.

Yes, they are further apart than they need to be, but they still tend to be within relatively short cycling distance. At certain times cycling is even faster than driving due to gridlock traffic, even in suburbs. For example, this very moment, because the main way through town is clogged with parents picking their kids up from school.

I think a majority of the problem is cultural and/or political. I know people who take a longer drive over a shorter bike ride (due to gridlock traffic).

Bikes can reach remarkably far in flat areas if the infrastructure is there. And with a folding bike you only need 1 bus as a range extender to go really far. However lots of money is relying on both those things not happening.

My son wanted to DoorDash a burrito from chipotle. I told him to look at the final price and compare it to chipotles website.

The $8 burrito is listed on doordash’s website for $11 + a delivery fee they were waiving for a first order (not sure what it would have been).

When the popular running theme of complaints is "it's impossible to do X because poor people all work 168 hours a week minimum", it's easy to excuse wasting your money to save time.

I mean they hide it as best they can. Big restaurants like Applebee's you'll see "2 for $28" not priced at $28 so you can guesstimate the squeeze but otherwise you kinda have to go straight to Starbucks or McDonalds using a mobile app to order your "usual" to compare "here's what it looks like if I use DoorDash, here's what it looks like if I go myself," to find that the actual delivery fee is some $20-25 per order. Even worse, I'm pretty sure that they test algorithms to try to selectively lower this for new customers so that in the early days when you're more aware of the cost it seems like a steal.

Of course, you can arrive at the $20 just by thinking, "okay, I need someone to go do an errand for me, they'll have to drive to the restaurant, wait there for 15-20 minutes, and then bring it back... so it'll cost $15 for the hour of their time plus a few bucks of overhead for the platform plus a few bucks of messed-up-my-order insurance..."

Which gets us to 5 years from now when the DoorDash killer comes out, it'll be called Kourier or something starting with a K, and it'll start with trying to give Target a way to call up some extra trained Target employees, but they're cross-trained in packaging orders for K. One person will pick up 10 carefully-packaged K-orders, take them all to the central delivery hub, they'll get sorted into driverless cars that plot through some neighborhood some 10 stops, it'll be marketed as a real Amazon-killer and fly under DoorDash's nose -- InstaCart might balk, but DoorDash won't. Until they reveal some pizza-delivery partnership and suddenly within a year every restaurant has some K-employee working for them, whose job it is to batch orders down to the bikes that come by.

Sure, delivery times for Kourier will be 75, 80 minutes long at first. People won't mind because you pay $4 for delivery instead of $20. And Doordash/Amazon won't die, Amazon will just buy Kourier and DoorDash will focus on more rural locales.

Eh, that discourse is usually being advanced by people who never ride the bus, don't intend to start riding it, and have a personal interest in selling you a car. In real transit preference surveys, and historical outcomes, it is clear that people would ride a bus that goes to their destinations, comes often and reliably, and is reasonably priced, without regard to how many mental cases are aboard. So if a transit agency faces a choice of spending limited resources on policing the inside of the vehicle for lunatics, or adding a bus to the schedule, they should always choose the latter.

> A bus will pretty much always be inferior to a car.

I never have to clean a bus, or put gas in it, or change its oil. I don't even have to drive it.

I don't have to dedicate a big portion of my property to storing it, just to pay to park it somewhere else when I go out. I'll never get a ticket for leaving it in the wrong place, and I'll never have to go to court because I used it wrong.

I don't have to worry about it getting stolen, or crashed into. I don't have to worry about being unable to afford the insurance or registration. I don't have any wealth tied up in it, so its deprecation doesn't matter.

Having to walk a few minutes at the start and end of my journey is a small price to pay for such convenience.

And if I ever do need one, I can rent one for less than the average American's monthly payment. In fact, I can rent the exact one I need that day, which might be a pickup today but a minivan tomorrow.

In most places I've lived, busses are for poor people. Because anyone else will pay whatever it takes to get a car and avoid something like a _three hour_ round trip for something 10 miles away. I'm not kidding; my work commute is 10 miles each way, in a city of way more than 1M, and it's 1.5 hours total for me to get to work on time.

I've lived in one place where they were great. Dense urban environments can do that, though. So nuh us busses can be great (the trains were even better), but it seems like the US has zero actual drive to make public transit not crap.

Nobody denies that if we all chip in to build a door-to-door freeway and free parking for you it will be cool for you. The question is whether we have better things to do with our money.