Absolutely an advantage. There are certainly a lot more fast DC chargers around these days but Tesla has them in the right places (along highways) and generally seems to maintain them.

Someone who pays $2500 in federal income tax is probably not shopping for a $55,000 car though. To be clear to other readers: it’s not a credit against what you owe at filing time, it’s against your total federal income tax.

Cars when I lived at home:

$712 is not an average of actual payments people are making and the Moody report does not pretend it is. The author came up with “average”.

Ugh.  The headline is wrong.

The report said “the estimated typical monthly payment increased 1.7% to $712,” which is a new record high for monthly payments.

Agree. The Ioniq 5 turns my head every time.

A few guys I know plowed into a car last summer - almost certainly thanks to the same thing. It kills motorcyclists going too fast too. The driver may see you but judging closing speed is difficult.

Jan 2000. 7.875% and happy to get it. 22 years later, my 3.375% mortgage is $600/mo cheaper despite 2 decades of property tax increases (which are part of the payment - not sure if everyone else does that or not).

Oh snap!  I found myself rooting for your brother in the last episode.  Revert to mean, huh?

Not that close after all. I’m in Monmouth County. Riding is not great (which is part of the reason I dropped out for so long) but we make do.

We must live reasonably close to each other. The Cycle Gear NJ store is not far from me but I took the 90min drive to Philly because I needed *everything* (also restarting after many years off) and I thought my best chance of finding it was there.  I had also read they tend to have a lot of their house brand stuff…

RevZilla drop ships but also seems to have a healthy warehouse operation. When I was in the Philly store and they were out of a boot I wanted, they located it in the warehouse in Vegas (which the Internet just confirmed is an actual place).

I’ve had nothing but good experiences with RevZilla. I’ve been to the (fantastic) Philly store twice for gear.

Wow. That’s eye opening. $9k under MSRP and, since they’re obviously not a charity, they’re still making money. I wonder how much time they spent on you in total.  A couple hours?

Today I learned that shooting brake == 2 doors.  I did not know that.

So THAT’S where that comes from. There is a clearly disturbed individual near me that has a hand painted sign in front of his house (underneath the tattered Trump 2020 flag) that has some incoherent rant that includes a reference to “didn’t do that”.

Yeah, that makes me angry every time I see it.

Yeah, I addressed that. Restated, the difference between investing 30k - while paying interest on a loan - and just buying the car (and getting additional cash off) is just not a consequential number to us.

I may be talking out my @ss on this but I’ll bet that the number of people who make the analysis to take a long loan to ‘pay in cheaper dollars in an inflationary environment’ is quite small. My wife paid cash for her car because why not? IIRC, she got 500 or 750 back by paying cash vs the loan offer. If there was a…