The other aspect is a lot of older luxury cars were also very well built, and older economy cars were some real bare-bones shitboxes.

My father enjoyed driving his Mercedes, so I figured I ought to enjoy a German luxury car as well. I expected to pay a certain premium on parts, and obviously for premium fuel and synthetic oil, but that I'd get a much more solid feeling car in return.

The problem is, the Mercedes he drove were from the 80s and 90s, so parts markup aside, they were basically Toyota reliable.

The German car I bought was from the mid-2000s, and nowhere near as well built or reliable as a 90s Mercedes, even in present day.

I'd even owned a 1986 Mercedes that was still reliable in 2010, I'd also owned a 1992 Mercedes that was also reliable, and continued to be so after I sold it to a friend who drove it for all of university (2010-2015).

But it was the 7 year old one that basically fell apart despite me buying one with full dealership service history, then sinking endless money in making sure all the repairs were done properly with OEM parts, on top of my religious maintenance as I'd believed German cars were only problematic due to neglectful owners.

So, it went about as poorly as you'd expect.

Or people just enjoy having a car that they like? If you can afford it and you spend a lot of your time in your car, why not get one that you enjoy driving?

It's the "if you can afford it" part that's at issue here. Sure if you have the money do whatever you want, but lots of people are leasing/financing cars because they can technically "afford" to spend 1/4 of their take-home salary on a monthly payment when they could never dream of buying the car outright even with years of savings.

They're living at their means instead of within their means, let alone beneath their means. So the moment any financial difficulty comes their way they're screwed. It's especially irrational if it's just for extra enjoyment beyond necessary comfort. Someone who takes out a personal loan to buy all the blu-rays he wants would be called financially irresponsible, yet it seems perfectly reasonable to some to pay hundreds of dollars a month extra for that BMW or Range Rover.

I'll say for a long time I was the same way, until I bought a Prius.

A little while after I bought it, prices actually went up over what I purchased it for, and I was getting letters from Toyota dealerships offering to buy it back from me above my cost.

It's declined in value since then, but still runs well (knock on wood).

This isn't saying used cars aren't worth it -- they definitely are -- but for certain scenarios I think the choice is maybe more complicated than I thought for a long time.

Well, in 2009 my Dad's also had the same experience with the dealer who wanted to give him $5k more than he paid for his year old Silverado - I think it was due to the overall market undergoing massive inflation (not reported as "core inflation") due to QE and other stimulus efforts.

I doubt the same would happen now with an economy halted.

Similar here and I leased a car once. Never again. Always used. There was a poster higher up the thread who flips cars that knows what they are talking about. You don't have to be at that level but just some common sense and research gets you a solid, clean used vehicle that you can depend on for years if you don't care about any ego shit and you take care of it. This and houses are our biggest impediments to real wealth as North Americans. We dump so much of our earned wealth that could be used to save and invest in our futures instead padding the pockets of car salesmen and banks.