this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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Don’t put Hyundai on a pedestal.
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/categories/cars/
Sure, but that's kind of every car manufacturer right now. If you let that limit your choice, you won't be buying anything. Depending on where you live, maybe that's better.
Then don't buy anything.
If you want to stop shit behaviour you need to provide consequences.
Buy a used car instead, there's plenty of them.
When the new car market falls apart these manufacturers will change their ways.
But because people are unwilling to part with even the tiniest bit of convenience, prestige, whatever the fuck it is, I wish I knew, then the bad behaviour is encouraged and then you're left in a situation where the market sees there's no consequences for adding this shit to their products and they all do it.
Then everybody suffers.
So, I'm supposed to drive an older, less safe car without the features I want? I'm supposed to keep using an ICE? No thanks.
I will be the first one to tell you that the infotainment system in my Subaru makes the car LESS safe to drive.
I can believe that. My job has me travel, so I've rented a lot of different vehicles. Some are definitely more intuitive than others. I don't think I've had a Subaru though.
Less safe? What features do you need that, say, a 2015 model can't have?
An ICE that is still on the go is more environmentally friendly than manufacturing an EV from new... A new EV versus a new ICE, yeah fair enough. But replacing a perfectly functional ICE vehicle with a new EV for environmental reasons is just marketing, consumerism, and trend following.
To stop bullshit spying of every part of a vehicle, to stop bullshit waste of perfectly functional vehicles, buy used.
Obviously, fuck cars, use public transport if you can, but that's unfeasible for most, so buy used!
Especially if you can get your hands on something like a 1.0l with a giant turbo strapped to the side. They're pretty common in Europe, I don't know about America.
assist, and adaptive cruise control come to mind.
Well, buying a new car is what I'm interested in. I want something reliable, not something with 10 years of wear and tear on it. Hell, a big draw of EVs is their dramatically simpler maintenance plan. If I'm in the market for an EV, a 10 year old ICE just isn't a good alternative.
I really wish... I got back into motorcycles this year, so I have a 250cc engine to move me around now.
You can get adaptive cruise control as far back as the 1998 Mercedes S-class. Though that model has a lot of issues. Get 2005+ for nightvision and other cool toys plus better reliability.
A 2025 Hyundai is not going to offer you significantly better safety than that, if it's truly safety you're after. Definitely not some small CUV that fits entirely in the the front crumple zone of the S. You're right about maintenance though. Just lease something new and let the second or third owner worry about the consequences of modern maintenance schedules. Or like you said, get an EV and sell it before the battery warranty is out. It's not like you're actually going to be able to affect an entire industry by holding out on buying new lol. Just don't be left holding the bag on the repair costs of modern cars.
2025 Hyundai EV is going to require FAR less maintenance than an old Mercedes. I've owned a fairly young VW and immediately dumped it when the manufacturer recertified warranty ran out. Every little repair on those German cars are ridiculously expensive.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. Historically, boycotts just don't work unless the overall sentiment was already shifting. Like Tesla right now. They were already losing sales because of their tired designs and were already offering deep incentives. Elon just accelerated the downfall by going full Nazi.
I mean in terms of total cost of ownership you'll still win with the 20 year old Mercedes purely because the maintenance and repairs won't make up for a 50k price difference, nor do they have much left to depreciate.
But I also understand the desire to have a car with which you know exactly how much it'll cost you over the next year.
You can also buy an EV for a dramatically lower price by buying it just a couple of years old. Their initial depreciation is massive. You can get a 3 year old Mustang Mach E for less than $30k and have Blue Cruise. That will have far fewer maintenance worries than a 10+ year old Mercedes. Even brand new, they can be bought for less than $50k. I don't think your $50k price difference is accurate. I personally wouldn't touch an old German with a ten foot poll.
I personally wouldn't touch an used EV with a ten foot pole. I've repaired everything on my older Mercedes, Audis and BMW and with the exception of some idiotic things Audi does, it's all simple to DIY, or not that much money at an independent shop (NOT a dealer - those guys charge 3-4x the hourly rate of smaller shops and always upsell you to replace more parts), but the Mach-E's battery will cost 37k USD to replace according to the Mach E forum. So you can't really own it past its 8 year/100k mile battery warranty, unless you want to be potentially be left holding the bag on a repair that costs more than the car itself. I considered a used Audi E-tron for a while due to the depreciation, but the battery pack goes 12k USED on Ebay. Getaudiparts.com lists 4KE915910BB at 34k. And it's an American site so it doesn't even include VAT, which in my country is 22%, soon to be 24%. I'd honestly rather get my hands oily once or twice a year than risk being left holding that particular bag.
Switching to euros now for used car pricing because that's what we use here and it's easier for me to compare car prices locally:
The 50k price diff is accurate for new BEVs vs old ICEs. I can have a 1 year old Mustang Mach E with dealer advertisement stickers (yuck) on it for 56k, or I can get a used Mercedes for anything between 1k (immediately needs repairs) to 6k (for a clean one) to win by 50k. Over the next 5 years the Mercedes might require 3-5k worth of repairs with below average luck, just oil changes with really good luck, or be totaled and need to be replaced with really bad luck, in which case you can buy a new one and still come out ahead. At the same time, over the next 5 years, the Mach E will almost certainly lose 20-30k in value. Similarly, a new Hyundai Ioniq 5 is over 50k. I did test drive it when it came out and while it was definitely quicker than my diesel 2003 E-Class I had at the time, but it didn't feel anywhere near as nice to drive other than the whole acceleration thing. Because it's a Hyundai, it's not supposed to feel nice. It's supposed to get you from A to B for cheap.
There was a guy once on a forum who bought a damn V12 biturbo S-Class, ran it for a year or 2, sold it, and ended up realizing that the repairs, maintenance and depreciation cost him about the same as depreciation on a brand new Honda Civic in the same time frame. I can guess which one is a nicer car to drive.
I'm all for people switching to BEVs, but you certainly need to be leasing/buying them new unless you're happy working on a high voltage battery system to replace individual cells, or live near somewhere who does. I don't know of such a shop in my country. So regarding cost, old ICEs will always beat brand new BEVs, until battery replacements get cheap enough (at which point BEVs will stop depreciating as horribly as they do and the total cost of ownership over 4-5 years for a brand new BEV won't be as bad anymore).
I get that in the US, German cars are made by, maintained by, and driven by Americans so they tend to fall apart, but they're not really as unreliable as you make it out to be. My W211 E-class when sold, must've had about 700k km on it (it was rewound by someone so it only had 380k km on it when I got it, but there were modules that still reported the original mileage), still ran like new except for the steering gear which was an issue I had to pay several hundred euros for. I think it was around 400. My friend's W124 also had over 600k km, but as it's a much older model and had survived salted roads for several decades, it started developing too much rust. Of course, no contemporary Ford or Toyota survives here either, so you can't really blame the Germans here, everyone made cars that rusted back then. There are tons of million kilometer Mercedes taxis out there, including newer, supposedly less durable, models. BMW has also gotten their shit together. While the M57 was absolutely bulletproof, the N57 and N47 were utter shit as far as longevity goes. I've heard fringe tales of crankshaft damage at just 300k km and valvetrain issues were fairly common. Fortunately, the B57 engine is super solid. So is the B58 if you can't get a diesel. The best engine Toyota will sell you in one of their cars right now is the BMW B58 engine. Closest thing to a modern day 2JZ I know of.
So I mean sure, get a BEV. If you're getting brand new, it's definitely the better choice for the environment and potentially running costs compared to a brand new ICE. But you will NOT be saving money over time compared to a used car, even a luxury one, provided you get something sensible. If you don't feel comfortable owning a used German car, Lexus used to make pretty solid cars two decades ago that go for dirt cheap now, don't get a lot of issues, and will still be much cheaper to run than a BEV because of the depreciation on the BEV (if new) or the battery replacement cost (if not new). They also made pretty good cars a decade ago, but since they're not ticking time bombs like a BEV out of battery warranty, they haven't depreciated enough yet.
Dude, a brand new Hyundai Ioniq 5 starts at $42k. The used Mercedes doesn't cost -$8. Also, if you're in a country that uses Euros, that explains a lot. Your part costs are much cheaper for those German cars than ours are. If I lived in Europe my opinion would likely be different on German cars. Here in the US, if you used Lexus as an example, it would be a much easier argument for you to make.
I'm not even trying to say that a new car is more financially sound. That's a silly stance to take. But a 10 year old car just isn't going to have the same safety standards and tech of a new car.
Ioniq 5 starts at 54k after the government rebate here. We have this thing called VAT/sales tax which is not included in US prices usually, but is nearly always included in prices here.
German cars in the US aren't actually too bad to own, FCPEuro gives you lifetime warranty on everything, including brake pads and engine oil. Yes, you can send them back your old oil after buying new oil and you get the money back. The catch is that it only works if the car hasn't changed owners in the meantime. But you'll need to do your own labor, otherwise it's not going to be cost effective owning an older German car. The key is to buy a model that is known for its' longevity and ease of repairs and a good healthy DIY community.
As for tech - sure, you won't get Android Auto or Apple Carplay on most 10 year old cars. But all the latest and greatest safety systems started appearing in normal people cars around 10-15 years ago, and in heavily depreciated German nearly 20 years ago. Add the fact that crash safety pretty much linearly scales by the area under the car (literally width * length), an aging luxury car is actually about as safe as a new economy car, because while you're more likely to get in an accident if you're on your phone, you're also more likely to survive an accident once you are in one.
Look at this data, both the newish models via the dropdowns, and the PDF for the models around 2008 model year. You'll see that the 2006-2009 E-Class (really, it came out in 2002 or 2003) at least in its days was safer than most new mid-size vehicles are now. Usually you'll never see any Mercedes or Volvo near the deadliest cars, but you'll see some Hyundais, Kias, and of course smaller models from the American marques as well.
This is not safety ratings in the traditional sense, this is driver deaths per million miles driven. It's great because it includes both the likelihood of crashing and the likelihood of surviving a crash combined into one number. Downside is that it does include driving habits as part of it too. BMWs naturally get more deaths than Mercs because the owners are more likely to drive like shitheads.