Disposable Cars

Episode: 0279
Why do we have Throwaway Cars?

     Think all cars are built to last? Think again! 
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    Disposable cars have flooded the market for decades, allowing drivers to enjoy new wheels without the hefty price tag. They may not be forever cars, but they sure fill a need!  

      ​If you're one of those weekend warriors who likes to work on their own vehicles, try and save some money. Then you've been to one. You've gone to a wrecking yard and you've seen tons and tons of these vehicles, whether it be back in the eighties, nineties, hell, even back in the early days, of the automobile, they've always existed and new companies use them to enter markets. Some companies don't learn and don't move away from them while others use them to bring their brands back or even bring their brands out.
 
      Today, AutoLooks is going to be taking a look at those disposable cars. Why is it when you go to those wrecking yards, there's tons of them out there? Well, there's reasons for it and there's reasons why we have them in the marketplace.
 
      Welcome back to the AutoLooks podcast. I am your host, as always, the doctor to the automotive industry, Mr. Everett Jay, coming to you from our host website at AutoLooks.net If you haven't been there, stop by, check it out, read some of the reviews, check out some of the ratings, go to the links website page, big or small. We have them all car companies from around the globe, all available in one direct location. That is the AutoLooks.net website. While there's read some of our reviews, check out some of our ratings on vehicles. And if you really want to, read our end of the year review where we talk about what has happened, what's going on where we seem to be going in the automotive industry, all available on our host website. The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by Podbean.com If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over [email protected]. 

        ​So, like I said in the beginning, disposable cars. Yes, they exist. They exist in every facet of the automotive industry. Vehicles that are essentially made just to be thrown away at the end of their life. And we've all seen these. Hell, I've had these in my lifetime. I own one still, which is odd. But, you know, with it being such an entry level product with so much basic contraptions on it, it makes it so easy just to work on. Not when it comes to trying to get new parts because the original parts were built to fail. Yes, disposable cars.

       There are some great companies out there that have started their life out as literally just throw away junk made to hit a market to get buyers in, to make some money, to reinvest and make themselves better. That's essentially how companies like Volkswagen, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Skoda, Dacia, hell, even Datsun when they came back a few years back, all started out that way. They literally started out as cheap throw away vehicles.

       And they built them on mass to ensure the public would buy them. Now, these are vehicles that can be highly rated when they first come out. All these magazines’ reporters, all rave about them. They got every single thing you need. Hell, I remember it. It was the third generation Hyundai Accent seeing a commercial for it. And it was one of the first production vehicles like mass produced vehicles in North America that came standard with power windows in an economy entry level vehicle.

       Power windows, something that everybody has now. Like how many people today own a vehicle that they just bought, literally just bought from this year, either 2025, 2026, 2024, whatever that has roll up windows, little crank windows on it. No, everybody's got power windows and companies like Hyundai and Kia bought these parts in mass quantities and pile them into these junky cars, knowing that they just at the end of their life, they'd literally just be thrown away. And then where do they wind up? Well,

        Like in our intro, if you're a weekend warrior, like myself or my, coworker, you go to places like Kenny-u-Pull or universal, and you go and pull parts off of cars or hell you just buy parts from these wrecking yard companies. These companies buy out all of these old wrecked vehicles. When you sell it off for scrap steel, a lot of times they just go to a wrecking yard because some of them, unless the vehicle is completely rotten away, the engine is completely gone, nothing that can be salvaged on it. They're not going to cube these things unless they're really desperate for money. 

      ​A few years back, they found an original Jaguar E type sitting in a wrecking yard in Great Britain. The shell of it literally just sitting there with the engine block, not all the parts, but literally just sitting there for decades. But they never got rid of it. Somebody saw the entire vehicle and said, I want that. Like, you want to get some parts? No, I want that. I want the whole car. And they rebuilt the whole thing. Now, the E-Type back in the day wasn't a throwaway vehicle. There are some people that drove them until they just got a little too expensive. And they just literally just threw them away. But it wasn't a purpose-built throwaway vehicle. You want a purpose-built throwaway vehicle. My parents owned one of these. And this car company used them on mass to rebuild themselves after their near bankruptcy in the 1980's Yes, I'm talking about Chrysler Corporation and I'm talking about the K car platform utilized fort the 400, the reliant, the New Yorker, the K car, the town and country, the Caravan.
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      It was used for a massive number of vehicles for Chrysler Corporation. And these platforms were so versatile and could have so many different models on them. They can make money off of it super easily. And they did that without putting tons of technology and tons of features into these things. Yeah, we get it. Like the New Yorker versions of it, of the K car platform did have, you know, that talking computer that really annoyed the fuck out of you when you're trying to work on the vehicle. Your door is ajar Your door is ajar. Your door is ajar. No, it is not. It's a door. Who's ajar. I hook up a toaster and make some toast, put some jam on it. No, it's not ajar. I know that's one of those funny English words for any of my fans listening to all the other countries when they translate this ajar means the door is open. It's kind of funny, but it's not ajar. It had technology in it.
 
      But when you go down to the Dodge and the Plymouth variations, they were basic roll up windows. Like you where you were lucky if you even had air conditioning in the damn thing. Hell, I remember my dad having to pull a lever on the floor to open a vent to allow cold air to come in because you couldn't even pull cold air in. Like you would boil going down an interstate in the middle of summer, because unless you're going to roll down the windows and get that whoosh sound coming through, you got nothing else. It's literally a car that was made to be thrown away when it started becoming problematic. You didn't pay to repair it because you knew that fixing it costs more than the car was ever worth. If you turned around and sold it, these were vehicles that when they got to a point where it can cost you more than three or $400, you knew the car just was just easier to sell up $100 to a scrap steel place or a wrecking yard rather than trying to fix it. 

        ​Kia Rios was famous for this thing. And yeah, I, I'm aware of that. I own one of these things, but basic and I've replaced half the fricking car because all the original throwaway parts have literally been thrown away and replaced. I only kept it because it's a stick shift. Try and find a stick shift in today's market. Even shit like that. You got to keep it around because it's one of the only ways you can have a five speed in today's market without spending major coin. But these throw away vehicles, these companies made these to make money. Kia introduced the Rio. Now we get it. Kia was here before the Rio. Hell, they were here in Ford form because Ford was essentially helping Kia build itself during 1980s and into the 90s. They thought they would buy them out, but they didn't realize that the Korean government does not like outsider ownership of its pride and glory corporations, unlike in Canada, where we allow it.
 
       Trust me, my home city, two major mining corporations, both of them are not Canadian anymore. So, they blocked the Ford deal. If want to hear more about that, go back and listen to our old podcast about Ford's Korean influence and how Ford essentially helped build both Hyundai and Kia. Yeah, it's pretty good listen to go back to and learn some stuff. Kia introduced the Rio to the North American marketplace, an entry level economy vehicle that can be had for under $6,000 in the early 2000s.
 
     The clue to this is at a point in time where entry level even into the automotive industry buying like a Chevy Cavalier, you're looking at $10,000 buying a Rio bare minimum like my little Rio wagon version, five speed roll up windows. Hell, it didn't even have a tape deck or anything in it. It was a radio bare minimum. And only $5,000 for the thing. That is, it. Five grand.
 
       I get it, five grand is what you'd see for a decent used car at that point in time. But you could buy a decent used car or you could buy a brand-new Kia within between a three- and five-year warranty, which means you're covered for five years. And an old boss that I hated them. I'm just going to put that out there. But I remember him telling me a story about one of his first cars when he went away to university. He bought a Hyundai Pony. Yeah, we all remember the Pony.
 
      The Pony and Excel, essentially where the cars that helped create Hyundai in the North American marketplace. We get it, Hyundai was here in the 70s, but it really wasn't until the Pony and Excel came out in the 80s, that these cheap little vehicles got people out of buying used cars and into new cars with a four-year warranty.
 
        If you're in university and you're only there for three years, you buy this car your first year, as long as you can make the payments on it. Within one year of graduating university, all you have to do is secure a good job where you can get rid of this thing before the warranties up and never have to deal with any major issues in it. It was a smart idea. He did this, not to say like I didn't like the man, but the man was smart when it came to that sense. He bought an entry level economy vehicle knowing that before its warranty ran up, you literally had to throw this thing in the garbage because fixing it would have cost you too much. 

      My dad owned one of those, old Renault alliances. You know, it was also the AMC Alliance. Renault knew they had a problem with these things, but they couldn't fix them. It was a garbage car. Once it started leaking oil, that was it. Throw it away. You couldn't fix it. My Rio, like I said, it's a damn thing. was 2002, turning 24 years old, one year away from being a classic. But at this point in time, when I first bought it, it literally wasn't a car I should have paid to fix. When the engine went, I could have bought myself something new rather than having that car. It should have been thrown away. 
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       My parents knew that with their K car. When the engine caught fire, it wasn't worth salvaging because even fixing the engine, they would be out over a grand on fixing it. Remember, they got back to Canada from a vacation. If they tried to sell it, they were lucky if they got $500. So why would you pay to fix this thing? These companies made these to make a massive amount of profit at them. Yeah, they were still able to build them and sell them at such a low price that they made some sort of profit off of it. And knowing that these vehicles wouldn't fail until after the warranty expired, they knew that people would just unload them before the warranty. And when you sell them off, then it becomes a used car in your dealer. You don't have to apply any warranty to it. The next person is literally stuck fixing the damn thing. And during that four-year period, you made tons of money off these products. 

       So, like the Rio, they sold thousands, of thousands of them while making minuscule profit. So, let's say they're selling them for $5,000 here in the end, maybe make still about a thousand-dollar profit off each one of those vehicles to multiply that by half a million. That's still a good chunk of change that you can reinvest into its second generation and make it slightly better. Or you could reinvest in new technology. You can reinvest it into buying new technology for it. They took tons of money from the first-generation Hyundai Accent to pour in to ensure that they can have power windows when this third generation came out to make them standard, bought mass quantities of them. And as we all know, by going to places like Costco or even Walmart with their buying power, buying things in massive bulk to keep the price so low, don't you buy things on mass quantity, you can keep the price even lower.

​       Now, why is that change in today's marketplace? Well, in today's marketplace, a lot of these car companies know that they flooded the market with tons and tons of automobiles. And even after these vehicles are built, they still have to build parts for five years. So, they've warehouses full of parts for these throwaway vehicles that are never going to get fixed. This is all scrap steel, all wasted production. You don't see a lot of this now because you don't see a lot of new car companies trying to enter the markets. The automotive market in today's world compared to the world of the 90s is flooded. Nearly every market is saturated with so much competition that just trying to enter is crazy. Tiny little companies like Slate Automotive and even Alfa Motors in the United States, they're trying to build themselves off these disposable throwaway vehicle platforms for the electric vehicle industry now. And with that, they're trying to build themselves up.
 
        So why would you need even more companies? Well, there are new niches and new parts. And we all know today there's no entry level products. You got to remember companies like Hyundai, Kia, Dacia, even Yugo and Datsun all entered the market in the economy world. They entered when the market was demanding tons and tons of vehicles. And they saw the easiest way to get into it is a mill of mass quantity of cheaply made vehicles to sell them at the lowest price point possible to get people through the door to spend tons of money in the hopes that you're going to sell them aftermarket parts at a premium or you're going to sell them their next vehicle.
 
        So essentially these disposable vehicles were the world's way of getting us all into it. Now, essentially, they created an entire new industry, wrecking yards, private garages, backyard mechanics. All of these people were expanding because you needed to fix these and the used car market for people that couldn't afford to buy brand new were buying these disposable vehicles at even cheaper rates. But now you needed to keep them on the road. They may have been disposable and throw away, but in some cases, there were still people out there who would buy them as secondary vehicles.
 
        Now, up until the early 2000s, gaining entry to the automotive world can only cost you a few hundred dollars. Seriously, even by the time I was having my son like 13 years ago. I was able to buy an entry level vehicle for $500 and gain access to the automotive marketplace as a secondary vehicle. We had paid off our Suzuki or, you know, $10,000 vehicle that I only had to fix maybe once a year. It was good quality but I needed something else because we couldn't survive with just one vehicle between the two of us working and a young child.
 
         So, these disposable throwaway vehicles created a new marketplace. People like me, somebody who was a backyard mechanic and could fix these and allowed brand new technology that I never once had before to enter the marketplace. Like I said, power windows became essentially mandatory by the main teen years. Seeing a vehicle with just a radio in it was unheard of unless it was a fully up-to-date luxury vehicle where just radio meant Bluetooth technology having a standard radio full of windows. Hell, even dual folding seats in the back. I owned a Malibu, a 99 Malibu where the back seats didn't even fold base model Chevrolet in 1999 had roll up windows, no features whatsoever, a base radio and the back seats didn't even fold. Where my Kia Rio, the back seats folded in it. It was an economy car that had 60 40 folding seats in the rear of it because they added these features to get people into them. And by adding that and spending a little bit of extra, they could gain more of that market share early on.
 
       And that was the thing with disposable vehicles. It was to ensure that these companies can get market share away from the big corporations. Chrysler made its comeback with the K car in the 1980s, a disposable vehicle that at the end of its life, you literally threw it away and forgot about it. Nobody was keeping these things as classic vehicles. Nobody wanted to pay to fix them. They were literally just tossed to the garbage.
 
        When they broke down the side road, you literally just left it there. Road on the pink slip, please take away, walked away from the damn thing because you knew it was going to cost you more even just to tow that thing back to your house than it was ever worth. But by doing that, Chrysler entered a price point that GM and Ford weren't in. They got all those entry level automotive enthusiasts. And when you get into the entry level world, as we talked about one of our previous podcasts, you gain access to the first market. Today in North America, there is no first market. There are no entry level products. Entry level these days, you're at $20,000. 25 years ago, entry level could be had for under five grand by buying a Kia Rio. We've increased $15,000 in 25 years. Average price per vehicle in 2025 is pushing $50,000. We're in the year 2000, the average price of a vehicle, you're lucky if it's pushing $22,000. More people can afford them.
 
        We get it. want more people taking public transit nowadays because literally our infrastructure is strained everywhere and we can't build roads fast enough for all the vehicles that we want to put on the road. So, we're trying to get people to carpool to like take light transit, to take the subway, to take the bus. So, by completely removing the disposable entry level economy market from the marketplace, you're doing that, but you're also creating an entire generation of people who have now learned they don't need a vehicle to get around, which means the market has hit its peak. And remember, every market expands and the automotive market, since it was created, has not slowed down. It wasn't until the late in the 90's that we start hitting a slight peak, but it was still growing. It just grew at a slower rate. In the 2008 crash, we hit that peak. And since then, we've grown less than we ever have any decade before. And because of that, all entry level and disposable vehicles are gone. 

        Now there are new companies looking to get into this, but why? Because they know there's still a market for it. And with disposable vehicles, all you need to create is a base model vehicle. There's less emphasis on home repairs and more emphasis on shop repairs. So, the vehicle gets thrown out. There are new codes, dedicated fluids where you can't fix it yourself. Hyundai has now made the new IONIQ with tools that only dealers can have even aftermarket mechanics can't fix these things. They're ensuring that their vehicles are dealer only. How when I sold my Borrego off, I originally thought the thing was thrown away because of how limited there's less than 1500 of them in Canada. I thought it was thrown away, but I guess somebody saw light at the end of the tunnel and fix the damn thing. But this is somebody had not seen the value in it. It would have been just thrown away because it literally was a disposable vehicle with a limited number of parts, longevity to get any of those parts and the age of the vehicle.
 
        Who's literally just a throwaway. When you look at companies like both Nissan and Toyota, they have fluids that are dealer only. So not everybody can fix them. General Motors now has codes in all their vehicles for the past 20 years. They've coded most of the full-size pickup trucks that secondary mechanics can't even get their hands on those codes for five years. For the first five years, when you're under warranty, you can't take that thing to anywhere else but the dealer. They're stressing dealer only vehicle.
 
       The original debt for these economy vehicles when they first started coming out was two to three years. Now vehicle debt surpassing eight years. And some people are even looking at nearly a decade to pay off a vehicle. How many people out there do you know who've kept a vehicle for 10 years? No one. Now we get it by removing the throwaway car market. You've removed a ton of waste from the automotive marketplace.
 
       You now don't have to have massive amount of warehouse to hold all these parts for years to come on vehicles that are never going to be fixed. You're not going to have flooded infrastructure with all of these economy vehicles like little Geo metros, Chrysler K cars, Kia Rios, Renault 4 and even Yugo, because we need people to take public transit. We don't need to quickly rush vehicles to the market because that entry level market is being pushed out to ensure we can keep our infrastructure not as tightly strained as it is today. We need disposable vehicles in some sense.

       Even today, there are disposable vehicles. The electric vehicle industry is essentially disposable market. First generation Tesla Roadsters and even Model S were disposable vehicles because that's all new at the end of the life of its battery pack. More people were inclined to toss the vehicle and buy a new one that is spend the price of one third of a brand-new vehicle to put in battery in an outdated design and technology. Sure, when it came out, I had top-of-the-line technology. They gave you all the features that everybody wanted, but it was never planned to make it past the end of its battery life. It was a throwaway vehicle. Now, these throwaway vehicles still have purposes today. In a North American marketplace, companies like Hyundai and Kia have moved up the ladder, where other companies like Yugo have completely disbanded.
 
       There is no need for the K car anymore. There's no need for a Yugo anymore. They're just junky vehicles. People demand better built vehicles than today's marketplace. Whereas the entry level market no longer exists because people have to take public transit. People wait longer to move out of their house until they're more financially secure because the cost of home ownership is exponentially higher than it ever was in past history. Sure, we make more money, but now it costs more money for everything else.
 
       Having these cheap disposable vehicles is more in line with growing marketplaces, places like Africa, India, China, the Asian marketplace, Middle Eastern marketplace, and African marketplaces where these entry level throwaway vehicles are made today. Companies like Mobius Motors, Changan FAW, hell, even FIAT is getting back to their original days of entry level disposable vehicles. They're reinventing themselves for new age as the entry level.
 
      Because Stellantis understands that without an entry level in growing marketplaces, how are people ever going to want to buy a Maserati, Lancia, a RAM if they don't enter the market at the lowest price point possible. If you look at the most successful car companies today, a lot of them started out with these disposable vehicles. After the fallout of the economy in the 1980s, General Motors reinvented itself with Saturn and Geo both entry level brands. Saturn was a quality entry level vehicle priced lower than the Japanese counterparts, both quality similar to the rest of the General Motors lineup, where Geo was essentially Suzuki, Isuzu, and even Daewoo products sold in the North American marketplace for entry level consumers. Essentially throwaway vehicles. How many metros do you see these days? Or Geo trackers. No, nobody kept them and they died. They died. You left them the side of the road and you walked them away. You didn't want them. It was a vehicle that got you into the market. It kept you there for a few years until you could afford to get that better vehicle. But when you did that with entry level vehicles like the K car, like the Geo, like the original Toyota Corolla, if it was decent for that short amount of time, you owned it. You stayed true to that car company. People who bought the original Kia Rio's not everyone, but a decent amount of those people thought they were decent.

      At the end, they traded it in and they got a Sportage. At the end of the Sportage, they traded it in when the Sorento came out. Then they had a family that got a Sedona. And by the time they were able to make that proper choice for a vehicle, K900 was out and the Genesis brand today was here. We can now move up the ladder and buy more premium products for the economy brand. We started life out with those economy cheap vehicles. How many people started out in the 60s and 70s with Toyota and Honda? Now they're their pride and glory.
 
       Hyundai has moved up the quality ranks by selling disposable vehicles. Chrysler rebuilt itself with economy vehicles. Dacia and Skoda pride themselves on their past of disposable vehicles because they wouldn't be here today without it. FIAT is trying to reinvent itself for the third time by using this. How Renault has brought back the Renault 4, its product that brought people into the market by trying to rebuild into the electric vehicle marketplace, the new age of disposable vehicles.
 
       And like we said, Alpha Motors and slate motors now see a market for entry level products. Even though we're trying to get more and more people off from driving vehicles, we still want to get that entry level consumer because that entry level consumer today who buys an entry level Toyota Yaris may buy it today. At midlife, they may get rid of vehicles and take public transit. They may Uber everywhere and realize it's cheaper. But when they get older and they want to have fun, they're more inclined to go back to the company that started them, the more likely to go back and buy a Lexus. We need those disposable vehicles. Every market deserves it and every market needs it.
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      North America is deserving of disposable vehicles. We get it. It'll create more waste for wrecking yards, but it'll also keep more people employed with mechanic jobs. Yes, the secondary mechanic is slowly dying out. And with car companies keeping people from being able to fix their vehicles at home, they're literally destroying the disposable car market and the automotive industry as we know it. A disposable vehicle at entry level life breeds brand new car companies. 

​        Most of China's automotive industries, companies like Chery, FAW, Shanghai Automotive and Changan all started out as economy throw away vehicles from marketplace that was heavily demanding vehicles. And what did they do? Yeah, they got subsidized by the government, but they also reinvested their money to build better products for the future. And today, FAW owns Hongqi, the top tier Rolls Royce product of China. Chang is considered a mid to upper range tier product range, falling in the same lines as companies like Toyota and Honda. Chery is asserting global dominance with Geely, who started out with throwaway products just in early 2000s, not even that long ago. But like I said, my Rio is from the early days of Kia entering the North American marketplace.
 
       It was a throwaway product. Nobody wanted to keep. Guess what? It turns 24 this year. Buying a Rio today, more inclined to have something that I might keep for five to six years, not just three. Disposable vehicles have a place in the automotive industry. We all require them. And every automotive market needs some sort of disposable vehicle because there are still people who live in areas without public transit and people in major cities need to understand this. Even in the major city that I live in in Northern Ontario, tons of areas around here where you need a vehicle just to get to work. And if you still want those people serving you your food or cashing you out at Walmart, they need to be able to get to work. And when rent in an urban area is more than a trailer on the outskirts, we need these disposable entry level products. They serve a purpose in the automotive world. And without them, the automotive world may not be here.

       So, if you like this podcast, please like share a comment about any major social feeds or streaming sites that you found the AutoLooks podcast on like a share us comment about us, follow us, send this feed out to your friends, your family, your well wishers, anyone you want to really care about. Tell them about it. Tell them what you want to know about the automotive industry. Tell them about the disposable vehicles. Tell them, ask them if they ever owned one of these crappy vehicles. Did ever own a Yugo? Did you ever own a Kia? Did you ever have Hyundai Pony?
 
     Find out where they came from what automobile started their entry into the automotive world because most people's entry into the automotive world was either a secondary product from a standard range or a brand-new economy vehicle from a disposable product. We all got our start somehow and not every company got started out building Ferraris. And after that, stop by the website read some of the reviews, check out some of the rates go to the corporate links website page, big or small, we have them all car companies from around the globe all available in one direct location. That is the AutoLooks.net website.

    The AutoLooks podcast is brought to you by Ecomm Entertainment Group and distributed by Podbean.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, send us an email over email at AutoLooks.net and myself Everett Jay, Ecomm Entertainment Group, Podbean.com and the AutoLooks.net website. Strap yourself in for this one fun wild ride that these throwaway cars are going to take us on.

Everett J.
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