$5.00 a gallon, will trucks get cheaper?

Snowdoggie (Forum Supporter) said:

Last time gas was $4 a gallon there were $500 Chevy Suburbans for sale in my neighborhood. One of those would make a great tow pig/dog park runner, even an old high mileage one.

I'm looking.

Escalades are usually beat to E36 M3, and people who want Escalades tend to want NEW Escalades.

I knew contractors who used them because of that. Cheaper than Suburbans and way, way cheaper than pickups or vans. As for the interior, who cares? It will be full of tools and paint cans and stuff anyway...

my truck gets 30mpg highway and has the aero of a brick.   Also the whole car availability issue. 

As much as it cost at the moment, none of my acquaintances are overly concerned. Everyone seems to have a lot of padding to their spending that they can pare down on, and since you HAVE to buy gas, why make a big deal of it?

Toys, Travel and Entertainment are all on the cutting board long before gasoline becomes the main issue for most people. 

tuna55 said:

I'm not only thinking no, but I am thinking a build thread to update the '88 would be way more fun for you, and likely get you a nice ride. What are the goals?

Goals, as previously mentioned, are a spare vehicle for truck stuff, backup vehicle for the cars, and eventually towing an 18-20 foot enclosed trailer to autocross events.

The reasons why I'm not going to continue with the GMT400 include the fact that I would rather do other things with my very limited time than work on it, it's a lot harder to do that work than it was 40 years ago, and I want a safer vehicle.

In reply to Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) :

Yep. That's why I sold my gmt400 last year and bought a Gmt900. 

Floating Doc (Forum Supporter) said:

tuna55 said:

I'm not only thinking no, but I am thinking a build thread to update the '88 would be way more fun for you, and likely get you a nice ride. What are the goals?

Goals, as previously mentioned, are a spare vehicle for truck stuff, backup vehicle for the cars, and eventually towing an 18-20 foot enclosed trailer to autocross events.

The reasons why I'm not going to continue with the GMT400 include the fact that I would rather do other things with my very limited time than work on it, it's a lot harder to do that work than it was 40 years ago, and I want a safer vehicle.

Got it. The safer bit is the hard part. Everything else can be swapped and upgraded.

I wonder if the number of people working from home will have an effect, too.  I have put around 15k miles on my Mazda5 since I bought it at the beginning of 2020.  It wouldn't have hurt a lot more to drive a Suburban.

Heck, if prices get high enough, it's tempting to post the Mazda up for trade for a tow vehicle.

A little over a month ago carmax offered me $32,100  for my Ram. Today with the same mileage, as I haven't driven it, the offer is $29,600. So I lost $2,500 in value in a month.  Could it be because of the effect gas prices are already having on the market? I don't know.

This quickly, it might not be the whole market, just them. If any secondary market company starts seeing a bunch of the same thing turned in at the same time and inventory numbers going up quickly they're going to lower the amount they pay for it. Or it could be their pricing analysts deciding to back off a little on the amounts in order to get some time to see what happens in the overall market. Even all three (market, company inventory, analyst decision). We see this sometimes in the used video game business where tons of people literally decide to sell the same game all at once (usually an Xbox realism-based game). For a huge company like GameStop when people make this decision their company-wide inventory of the game can go from 7000 to 700,000 in a week -- from 2 per store to 20 per store. That's when they lower the price and lower the amount they pay for it.