I like asking friends who grew up rich what small things about their lives were different. I asked one whether any of his friends had crappy cars. "Not really. Maybe one." He meant an older Honda Civic. I meant a car where more than two of the doors or windows don’t open, or one you can’t take on the highway. Another friend told me he wouldn’t know where to get a $5,000 car. Everyone knows there’s cultural knowledge in elite circles. There’s just as much cultural knowledge to being in the bottom two quintiles. When a car is on its last legs, we start asking around. Someone might know someone moving away or upgrading. The best case is a friend or a friend of a friend. A fellow waitress was selling hers for $1000 when she moved. That 15-year-old car lasted my dad five years. For my first car, we went to the part of town where there are a lot of mechanic shops. The lots sell cars from $1,500 to $10,000. A friend of my grandmother’s, Mario, ran one of these. My parents wanted me to buy a $2,000 Honda Civic. I splurged on a $3,000 car I thought was cuter. I was sixteen and paying with my own earnings. There was no bank loan or credit check. We paid Mario directly in installments. That’s the same combination that gets well-off kids their summer internships.

Status still exists here. My dad always had a Mercedes. The $1,000 car was a Mercedes. But you focus your buying research on how well the car runs. There’s no depreciation left to worry about. We keep the car until the repairs cost more than the car. To me, these cars are not crappy. A car becomes crappy when the annoyance becomes constant. Nobody I knew judged anyone on how a car looked. Most cities have a busy market of $1,000 to $6,000 cars. I’d guess the bottom two quintiles, about 40% of Americans, depend on it. The bottom quintile often can’t even reach the $1,000 car - it’s hard to get out of the cycle where you can’t get a job because you don’t have a car.

Policy interacts with this car market mostly by accident. In 2009 the U.S. government offered around $4,000 to scrap a car, as long as it was functional, insured, and registered. About 690,000 usable cars were destroyed. The money went to higher-income people for whom a $4,000 car is a car “at the end of its life”. The program appears to have raised prices of the oldest used cars. You can only protect what you can see. Mario chose to focus on cars that cost below $8,000.