I’ll drive my car until the wheels fall off —  you should too

Last month, my 2004 Ford Expedition wouldn’t start in a grocery store parking lot. I troubled a helpful stranger for a jump start with no success. I had it towed to the repair shop, where it spent about a week before I received the final diagnosis: the fuel pump failed. The car is spectacularly rusty, too, so they had to order a special tool to get everything out and replace it.

Three weeks and $1,000 later, I’m glad to be reunited with my car, which has never failed me before. It just cracked 90,000 miles in 20 years, and I intend to keep replacing whatever breaks until it is a ship of Theseus in my driveway, to squeeze as much mileage out of it as possible.

Pictured, above: what I hope my car looks like by the time I’m done with it.

That’s why I was struck by a recent Substack post by Robert Bryce, an energy reporter who worked with American Experiment to write a report documenting rural America’s backlash against utility-scale renewable energy. Mr. Bryce describes his decision-making about his 2012 Honda Acura much the same way as I think about my 2004 Ford Expedition, and it seems most Americans feel the same way:

Earlier this year, S&P Global Mobility found that the average age of cars and trucks in the US rose “to a new record of 12.6 years in 2024, up by two months over 2023.” In other words, the vintage of my 2012 Acura TSX is on par with the rest of the US fleet. Here’s the key paragraph from another S&P Global report on the same topic:

New vehicle prices remain prohibitively high for many consumers in the US, with average transaction price reported at US $47,218 in March 2024, according to S&P Global Mobility. Additionally, inflation is proving more persistent than expected and there is trepidation around the shift to electric vehicles. A combination of these factors has resulted in consumers keeping their vehicles on the road longer, driving average age upward. (Emphasis added.)

It’s far cheaper to repair what breaks than shell out for monthly payments on a new car (which will have newer, more expensive parts when they do break down). It would be even less feasible if my only option were an EV, which may be my only choice if “the pending EPA mandate that could require 70% of all new car sales to be EVs or plug-in hybrids by 2032” passes judicial muster. New vehicles of any kind are getting prohibitively expensive for most consumers, but EVs are even more expensive than that, despite tax breaks — and consumers don’t seem to want their “features” anyway. Mr. Bryce points out that EVs are only one percent of U.S. vehicles in operation.

I’ll still need gasoline as long as my clunker is on the road, and so will you. I’d encourage you to schedule an oil change this weekend (or do it yourself, if you’re handier than I) — EVs aren’t coming to the rescue anytime soon.