I read somewhere that the average new car buyer in the 50s bought a new car every three years. I’m somewhat doubtful about those claims; are they accurate or not? For that matter, was it less common in the past to buy used cars. And if there is a big difference between car buying patterns in the past and today, when did they change?
I doubt it too, but here is one data point:
Claims the average car lasted 6.75 years in 1930 vs 10.7 today. If you draw a straight line that would make the 1950’s around 7.7ish. That of course doesn’t mean people kept them that long - but cars certainly have changed. I seem to remember seeing lots of rust growing up - and don’t see that much anymore.
You can still look like you have a relatively nice car five or more years down the road - I wonder if the same was possible in 1950.
I don’t think it would be a straight line. The graph would have pretty sharp increases in the periods where things like electronic engine control, galvanization, CNC machining and so on were adopted.
I could certainly believe it - there is a lot hidden in the statement- because it is the
“average NEW CAR BUYER in the 50s bought a new car every three years” - so only looking at people who bought new cars in the first place. And it really implies nothing about how long the cars last, if the overall car market was expanding cars could last way longer than 3 years and that could still be an accurate statement - you’d just be selling to people who had never had a car before/were not retiring an existing one.
If you look at new car loans I believe 3 year loans were the most common ones in the 1950s, while 5-6 year loans are the most common today.
Note in the 1950s 100,000 miles was a good automobile life expectancy, while today we expect over 200,000 miles.
I had a family member that bought a new car every two years in the 50’s and 60’s. He was the top salesman at a Chevy dealership.
Several people in our family bought his trade ins and drove them for years. They had been meticulously serviced and better than factory new.
I had a girlfriend in the 1950’s whose family bought a new car every 3 years. Husband got the new one, wife got the 3 year old one handed over from hubby, and the wife’s 6 yo car got traded in.
The only reason was so that hubby had a new car, wife had an almost-new car, and they could afford it. Features, wear, repair costs, loan terms were not a factor.
And since you asked, they were Oldsmobiles, of course.
Cars of the 50’s era did not have long term durability. A car with 100k miles was usually about shot. The engine would have to be rebuilt because it was burning oil, it was probably rusted, the clutch and exhaust system had probably already been replaced.
The cars were marketed much differently. The big 3 shut down for two weeks in the summer for the worker’s mandatory vacation. That is when “model changeover” occurred. Each model was on a three year cycle. Year one: new model. Year two: minor style change. Year 3: Major style change (just sheet metal, same chassis). The next year they would introduce an upgraded model. The introduction of the next year’s models was a big deal that happened in September. The automakers hyped these “introductions” and tried to create drama about them. So people were marketed and sold on the three year cycle.
A perfect example of what I’m saying is the 1955, 56 and 57 Chevy’s.
Don’t really know what my parents were doing in the 50s, but in the 60’s they bought new cars in 1964, 1967, 1972, and 1975.
Was one of those a DeLorean? 
Here’s what skews the figures – there were a lot more people getting into driving in the 1950’s. More households were becoming two-car families, and more people in general started buying cars as people migrated to the suburbs. Because of the larger number of new cars being bought, the average age of all cars went down.
(My parents didn’t get a second car until I was four years old and my sister was almost a teenager.)
And yes, there were used cars around, but for the most part they had a poor reputation. Cars in general needed repairs after about 50K miles and were pretty much worn out at 100K.
As for when things changed, I mark it in the early 1980’s when Detroit started to realize that one of the reasons people liked Japanese cars was because they lasted longer than five years.
I remember as late as the mid 80s a car dealer looked at my father in horror when he brought in a car to trade that had 79,000 miles on it. Weren’t the 50s also a time where you could make a nice living on a blue-collar job, so a factory worker might buy new cars? I recall also Vance Packard- The Waste Makers- touched on Detroit trying to make cars look outdated after 3 years so you didn’t want to be seen driving one of them.
My folk’s first new car was a 1958 VW bus. Normally they bought used cars. We lived out in the country and dad worked in town. He drove a lot of miles in a year. Maybe around 10,000 miles. After school I did not get run into town to see my friends too many miles (10 miles). I remember a few of the family cars turning over 100,000 miles. that was a lot of miles. Now it more than 10 miles just go across town and we expect out 2013 car to last us 200,000 to 300,000 miles.
And in the 50’s every new year the car models changed. In a quick look I can tell the difference between a 55, 56, or 57 chevy. The major difference between the 2012 and 2013 is the door handles. Have to look closely.
Ford did a model change on the mustang in 64 sold it as a 64 1/2 model.
VW was one of the first to not have year models. If they thought there should be a change in the car they just did it. You have to know VWs well to know what year it is, but in reality it is a two year model.
Although that doesn’t necessarily reflect people buying cars less frequently. Part of why some of the ridiculously long car loan terms are possible (you sometimes see 10 year notes!) is that the depreciation curve is so much gentler and so the cars retain value as collateral a lot longer.
I also think the general paradigm back then was that you carried the loans to completion. These days, from the dealer’s perspective, it doesn’t really matter if the customer pays their car off or not so long as they owe less than the trade-in value when it’s time for them to buy a new one. Of course also leasing has sort of taken over the “new car every three years” market.
And people buying VWs were considered somewhat eccentric back then, since they were sold on quality, not appearance.
In the '50s Detroit tried to use a fashion, model for car sales, changing external things to encourage people to buy new cars to be stylish. Tail fins were the most blatant example. I remember that they pushed buying a new car every two years, which no one even tries to do today. An executive at the place my mother worked in the '60s did this. He sold the older car within the company. We got one.
And a combination of the oil crisis which drove people to high mpg Japanese and the realization that those cars were not junk killed the car as fashion strategy.
Eh? Lots of people still do that. Around here particularly there are old people who trade in every two years or even every year.
Dependability of cars is one reason the buying cycle would change over time, but so is the economic state of the nation…times were pretty prosperous in the 50’s, so I would assume people would be more likely to buy a new car rather than trying to eek every last mile out of the new one as they might have done in the 1970s or whenever times were tighter.
Frequent design changes in the 1950s may have been a RESULT of good economic times – if people have more money and are willing to buy new cars, you want to have a different looking car by the time they want to trade in and get a new one so they don’t switch brands.
That wasn’t a change, that was when the Mustang was introduced.
Not quite. There was no 64 Mustang, but the 65 came out early enough in 64 that a lot of people refer to it as a 64 1/2. 1965 is the first year model though.
In the burbs where we lived this was certainly the case in the very late 50s, into the 60s.
Kind of.
The pattern was a new car every 3 years but having 2 cars. One for each spouse. So 6 years actual turn-around.
But then again, we weren’t exactly rich. I could easily imagine in better neighborhoods that the three year rule was for all cars.
“Three years” was explicitly and frequently talked about as a suitable interval.
Back then, having, say, a ten year old car was considered an embarrassment.