It's something I've been grappling with lately, with a potential car purchase coming up. I really don't need much more than a mid-late 00s sub-compact Toyota or Honda of some kind but not going with something made in the past ~5 years feels a bit like a gamble.
If you don't keep your car you'll sell it. You won't be moving the needle on how long it'll take to amortize that initial manufacturing cost, it'll just happen with someone else driving it.
Likewise if you don't buy a new car someone else will, you're not going to move the needle on the overall supply.
I don't recommend buying new cars, but if you consider the above it's pretty much pollution-neutral.
All you're really doing is paying a premium in order to be the first in a long line of owners to drive that vehicle.
If an owner decides to keep and maintain their car longer than they would have in the past, that car will stay out of the junkyard longer and therefore reduce the need to produce new cars. They will use some of the money they would have spent on a new car to keep the old one going longer, and still pocket the rest of it as savings.
It's no more likely on average that the current owner is an enthusiast that's extending the usable lifetime of the vehicle than the next owner.
Especially since basically 99% of drives are under 50 miles.
That said, considering that most repairs are done to transmissions, fuel systems, and body panels (interior and exterior), cutting out everything but the body panels also cuts into the profits of dealership service centers. That's beginning to drive up the costs even more because the dealerships are padding the lot sales price with their markups to cover the loss that happens in the service department with EVs. People are starting to want a direct sales model like Tesla does, but that causes even more problems because direct sales cannot account for local market conditions or quick economic downturns the way dealerships can. Plus you get the problem of "When the hell am I getting my car back?" when it needs repairs or service because you have to ship your car off somewhere far away where they'll get to it as the backlog allows. A la Rivian and Tesla. Neither the customers or the manufacturers want a Rivian/Tesla repair center situation.
Automotive gross margins don't seem to reflect those numbers. Tesla's are around 25%.
My aftermarket exhaust is louder by design.
The embedded world in general is nuts. Unless absolutely necessary, nothing gets upgraded once a system works.
Or, say, some industrial machine - you might wish to allow network connectivity so that the vendor/service teams can get notified once a sensor detects signs of upcoming failure such as vibrations. But you can't connect it to your network, or have to take it off your network once the vendor's security support has passed, because otherwise you're just asking hackers to establish persistence on the system.
It tend to be actually a false.