And one of the points that's a little more obvious living here: Japan is a remarkably car centric culture. Not quite to the extent of America, but in much of the country you really do need a car.
If anything the main exceptions to that are exactly the places tourists are most likely to go.
I disagree, I lived a year in a small town near Osaka far from any tourist attractions and never did I wish I had a car. Public transport was ubiquitous and walking infrastructure excellent. Lots of people on bikes. Roads were tiny so cars on them are tiny and driving slowly, making it feel safe to share the roads with them.
Maybe the most clear indication that Japan isn't a car centric culture was the complete lack of FREE parking space.
So, yes, the extreme pedestrian hostility that is sometimes normal in the US isn't around, and there's more likely to be a viable transit system. That's especially the case if you're in the outskirts of a major metropolitan area where there are going to be commuters into the core transit network.
Still, if I hop on an express train for an hour away from central Tokyo, every house has a car park and most significant stores have dedicated parking spaces, and I get a vibe of "suburbia with narrower streets". Heck, I get some of that even as close as Kawasaki or southern Tokyo once you're away from major train stations.
Which shows that you can have lots of cars without having a cars-only culture. Freedom of choice of the mode of transport, and pay for privilege vs externalizing the costs of cars.
That can work for two apps but it's tedious once there are three or more. You'd also need to swipe back and forth between apps to find the corresponding prices for each ride type (Wait & Save, Standard, Comfort, etc.), whereas this app groups together the prices for each ride type across providers.
A $50k car used 1,000 miles per month probably costs close to a thousand per month, assuming 200k miles of life. I imagine this is not unusual in the US.
Stretching the analogy, something that gets you from point A to point B for a fraction of the price without the same level of comfort is totally fine for me. For some of my tasks, that means using local models. For others it might mean a frontier-last-year kind of model. That's totally acceptable most of the time. For anything else I guess it's like renting a truck to move; just get the right vehicle as needed and pay the premium.
Is it smarter to totally cheap out and have an unreliable car that breaks down, stranding you, causing you to miss work though? If you're in a line of work that's customer facing, where having a beater of a car is going to hurt your job prospects? Without knowing the rest of the context, absolute statements based on absolute numbers is also dumb.
How many months is this car loan? What was the down payment? What's the interest rate? We haven't even asked what kind of car it is yet.
