I’ve been receiving solicitations, by landline robocall and by regular mail, for extended car warranties. Some of them are for an 11-year-old car I own, and others are for a 2015 Jeep I have never have owned. With any luck it’s just a database error.
It doesn’t seem all that long ago when I read the average age of cars in America was six years. It’s now double that, which explains all the advertising for extended warranties.
https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/average-us-car-age-2022-report/
Follow-up: tastewar has provided further insight in the form of this helpful graph.
In a way this is good, because cars overall are a lot more reliable than they were in the post-war decades of planned obsolescence, when odometers had only five digits. Reaching 100,000 miles was considered both a miracle and a death sentence, and American cars driven on snowy roads treated with salt started to rust-out after only a few years. There was the Rusty Jones rustproofing service that was pushed by car dealerships. It required drilling holes into the body panels, and because it was often improperly applied, along with poor body work on the holes, the expensive treatment actually accelerated rust development!
CarShield advertises heavily on broadcast television. I am extremely dubious of extended warranty plans, and have no intention of ever buying one.
I get tons of these as well.