The $25k car is going extinct?

I was in the market looking for a used SUV for my wife to haul around our kids last year. Dealing with dealers who wouldn't budge even a few hundred off the inflated listing prices, the interest rates on financing and then the insane insurance costs was not pleasant. I have an old Subaru beater that I was also thinking about upgrading but after this whole fiasco I decided to spend some money to fix body and small mechanical issues myself and drive this thing another 10 years hopefully. It's just not worth it.

Subaru's have an increasingly good reputation for long-term reliability. Stick with and love the beater.

I find a certain liberation in not caring too much about risks of car park dents and "curb rash" and other surface-only non-mechanical auto-maladies.

Free yourself from the worry of shopping cart dings today! My solution was buying a hail damage car.

Yeah, haggling over used cars is dead and buried. The market doesn't accommodate it in a world where there's more demand for used than ever.

1. More people got priced out of new cars.

2. More people are driving their cars longer.

3. Caravana and other online predatory loan machines are outpaying dealerships for cars, and flipping them for nearly credit card level interest rates.

Also, us millennials don't want to deal with that shit anyway. List the price, keep it near KBB value and you have a deal.

You obviously have not been following Subaru, while what you are saying was once true, it has not been true for several years now.

Google "Subaru battery", read about all of the additional electrical problems that are the result of Subaru being unwilling to fix a problem that is the end result of them selling your data.

Subaru stopped making reliable cars somewhere around 2014.

That's very useful to know, thank you!