That's a different question than the parent (albeit a related one). If there's no one to buy 35k cars, there won't be a steady flow of 5k cars indeed, but I don't think people buy 35k cars because they're nice people trying to provide 5k cars to other people after a while

Of course they don't. But you can't declare dependence on an ecosystem, simultaneously declare that the ecosystem is stupid, then have people take you seriously.

You absolutely can. If everyone in a neighborhood tossed dollar bills on the street cause they didn't like carrying anything smaller than a five, it would make sense to both make a living picking them up and say "why the hell are they doing this?".

The funny thing is if you put forth such a good argument that it changed everyone’s perceptions of the value of old cars then market forces would drive that price up, possibly invalidating the argument in the first place. So... shhh, keep it a secret!

If nobody buys $35,000 cars, then people are buying $25,000 cars and you have instead a steady supply of reliable 10-year-old $3500 cars.

If the aggregate demand goes down for all the cars, prices should also go down across the spectrum (to varying degrees, but still)

The car manufacturers will just adjust and build some cheap car like Renault did with the Dacia brand.

That's still a $12,000-$22,000 car. Nobody can build one for $5,000 like anoncoward111 wants or needs, and it probably will be nowhere as reliable as a 10-year old Honda.

How selfless.

The people buying $35K USD cars aren't likely thinking about selflessness, true.

But the question remains, if everyone who bought new cars kept them for 20 years and drove them a lot, what would the used car market look like?

Similar the rental market, I'd guess. Mostly done by those who couldn't afford to buy new but at a greater long-term cost.

I've seen people commenting that the money you save on buying new just goes on repairs instead: I don't agree. There's a fashion and entertainment value to driving something that works just as well as a new car but is newer, so the market gets pushed down.

The example of the Subaru Outback comes to mind: these are relatively harder to find used because most owners hang on to them.

~30% of cars are leased, so those would still be available