I won't drive anything I can't fix. That seems to be old vehicles only.

The engine in my 1994 K1500 is fucked but I'll engine swap before I buy a spyware truck.

Just checked out a trade in 2026 model at a dealership. Had 14k miles already in 8 months and had a damaged head unit display (2k for replacement). Told the dealership they were gonna struggle to sell it, especially given that there's an actual branded dealership selling these all day long a mile away with a quarter of the miles and no damage. It's been sitting on their lot 2 months already with barely any online hits.

GM had a hissy fit that I suggested 2k less than their price, OTD, for me to drive it off the lot.

I suspect I'll be getting a call back in a few weeks when their quotas are low and they realize they aren't selling gold-plated Ferraris.

Hell, the new cars do that too.

Was it pre-spyware? I'll pay extra for pre-spyware vehicles. I work in IT, so I value my privacy.

They die and now all that stuff is your responsibility anyway

Tangentially related: Some times your relatives don’t even have to still be in possession of the item any longer to inflate the price and get offended. My mom goes on and on about how much some LP she had when she was 15 would be worth if grandma hadn’t of let it mold in the garage. I looked the album up and if she had a first pressing in mint condition it would be worth a bajillion dollars, but she most certainly played the shit out of a beat up copy of a 14th pressing that isn’t worth shit. Likewise, eBay fucks with their sense of worth, too. My parents will mention something they have being worth a lot of money and I’ll ask how they know only to be hit with “we saw that someone had one of these that went for several thousand.” And of course, looking deeper into unravels the entire plot of why that very not really rare thing sold for an unusually high price 10 years ago during a minor surge in popularity of that thing due to a new media reboot.

I avoid this problem by not using Facebook

Oh no, not the end. At the end, you have a week to dispose of what can be charitably described as a hoard of useless boomer nonsense.

so like brand new if it's a Toyota

People are selling their five year old used GPU for a 50% markup on MSRP. It's crazy out there.

I know several people who did that - trucks, boats, campers were all worth more used during COVID than they were worth new just a year or two before. You may recall there was a massive chip shortage during COVID and new vehicle production was greatly impacted.

Inflation does crazy stuff like that.

In the 1980s here in Brazil there were people that made a living by buying new cars and reselling them before the store managed to bring the actual car from the factory.

Let's not pretend that a lot of good cars met an early end in C4C. People were hauling in their broken garbage to cash in. Nobody was bringing in some pristine example of anything good. A whole lot of raggedy minivans, crappy econoboxes and rusty trucks got sand in their engines. If they were worth anything, the scrapyard could have plopped a new motor in them and resold them.

C4C cleaned out the bottom of the barrel shit. Unless you were dying for some fucked up shitheap of a car, nothing of value was lost. If someone was dumb enough to roll in with something useful, you know damn well that the dealer would have given them the same money for it and just resold it. Yeah, you weren't supposed to do that, and politicians aren't supposed to fuck children either.

That was also when the CAFE standards changed and suddenly small trucks became effectively illegal since fuel economy standards started being based on vehicle footprint.

It's why trucks started growing in size so much. The manufacturers figured out it was easier to make cars bigger than to make them more effecient.

And it's ✨shinier✨

That's called marketing, baby 👉😎👉