Car ownership has long been integral to the American dream. But as automakers slash the production of inexpensive models to cater to customers who can afford oversized pickups and sport utility vehicles, buyers find themselves facing sticker shock at the same time they are already frustrated by the lingering effects of high inflation.
Consumer prices rose 3.3% in March, the biggest yearly increase since May 2024, while new car prices were up 12.6% from a year ago, the Labor Department reported Friday.
New vehicles now sell for an average of nearly $50,000, up 30% in six years, and average monthly payments — based on 10% down and a 6-year note — recently hit $775. Looking for something on the cheap end? The share of vehicles listing for less than $30,000 is about 13% — down from 40% five years ago, per the car review site CarGurus.
Wouldn’t it have been nice if the US had a mass-transit system like Europe or China? Oh well.
Don’t worry… that extra cost gets you more LCD displays and the ability to pay for a heated seat subscription.
It’s fine. They’ll take away all the stalks and buttons to keep the prices from rising top fast.
In Europe physical buttons and stalks are coming back for the key interactions, even on the fully electric 20k EUR Renault, might be because without them, cars get downgraded in their safety score, as they should. But then, you also get downgraded for producing a car that is more dangerous to pedestrians than it needs to be. None of that appears to be much of an issue for US car safety organisations or regulators.
I’m 60, I’ve never bought a brand-new car, and I doubt I ever will.
The car I’m driving now, which is two years newer than the car I drove for 18 years, is a 2006. I paid $6000 for it about eight years ago, and I’m very happy with it.
Yep, I find it insane people who buy a new car every few years. Cars don’t just die after 4 or 5 years of use. Most of my Toyotas have 300k miles on them and are early 2000s. They will last way longer than most people assume. Just maintain the damn things.
My car is 46 years old. Average vehicle in Australia is 10-12 years old. People who exclusively lease new cars are nuts! Assuming petrol is still around I’ll keep my car going as long as I can - and even then I’ll only swap an electric drivetrain into it. There’s nothing wrong with the rest of the car
As the owner of an 01 Tacoma I can confirm, the damned thing is basically a modern Model A/T. It has a good chance of lasting 500,000 miles and being resurrected afterwards.
I got 400k miles on my current truck. I need to do some repairs to the frame, but I’m going to keep driving it because it’s still cheaper to keep it running than deal with a new truck that also needs money put in to it to fix factory design defects.
V8 version?
Standard cab 2WD V6. Pretty solid for me though and gets mileage comparable to modern cars. Figured that if I’m gonna have a pavement princess I’d at least get one with the specs of one and the repairability of a Yugo.
The 5VZs are stupid reliable if you do the maintenance on them. They’ll basically outlive you lol, I’ve seen people with 500k miles on the stock motors no rebuilds and still daily driving them.
This supports my hypothesis that living in the city with buses and trains is worth the higher costs.
We sold our car and moved to a modern developed city. Only been in on taxi in 8 months, but we ride the trains every day and walk to the local stores for most things. It works great and I would hate to go back to a car centric old world place.
Sounds like a dream. Maybe the UK will one day reach this level of transport integration.
The UK is making some progress. I know Edinburgh and Glasgow are building as they can. They need to get back to digging tunnels soon since trams are great, but very speed limited.
London is world class for pedestrian access and the biking infrastructure is coming along nicely. Get Oxford Street pedestrianized and you’ll have a jewel in the shopping district.
The smaller cities do hold onto a kind of vision where cars are the modern day horse ride through the countryside, but once the rail network gets renationalized and back up to speed there will be more demand for local transit improvements.
I’ve been saying this for years but it has taken the current political environment for people to not treat me like an idiot for thinking it.
Including the stress from noise, lights, and concentrated pollution? I’m not sure.
The only noise I hear is my music playing from a speaker and a fan. I’m getting natural light from the windows. I have curtains in my bedroom that turn it into a cave.
The pollution, maybe. A lot of that is caused by cars. My parents lived out in the suburbs, but rather close to a major highway that wasn’t good for environmental quality, and was loud.
Cities aren’t loud. Cars are loud.
Cities aren’t loud. Cars are loud.
This reminds me, whenever you hear like stock “city noise ambiance”, yeah, it’s all car noises.
Vrooms, horns, maybe somebody’s thumpy car stereo bass. All cars. And like, very low people chatter by comparison.
Going further on this tangent, this made me remember specifically Baldur’s gate 2 (two), the ambient noise when you’re outside the copper coronet. It’s people sounds- talking, the occasion laugh or shout. It always made the place feel alive and interesting to me in a way car noises don’t.
Most of the noise and pollution in cities comes from cars, many of which are driven by people who live in the suburbs and drive into the city…
People who live in the suburbs are exposed to Far higher levels of pollution from being in traffic and get far less exercise. Cities are not loud unless you’re in a tourist area.
Car prices will rise until all cars are self driving and nobody can afford to own them so you will rent driving time when you need transportation. This rental time will be even more expensive than ownership but it will be all you can afford.
You will get deals from driving subscriptions, but the ownership model will go away almost completely someday and big companies will continue to reap the rewards.
I really love my e-bike more with every day
The rest of the world will just buy Asian cars and get on with it.
That’s a good thing from an environmental perspective.
Not necessarily. Same number of people are doing the same amount of travel by car, but now instead of the car sitting at parking lot it is driving off to do another errand. More efficient in terms of fewer cars needed, but overall it’s more vehicle miles and more congestion.
They’re going to be EVs, so it’s still a net positive for the environment. Fewer EVs means less lithium mining.
Less cars on the road also means increased safety, especially when self driving technology is more mature. Humanity is absolutely horrible at driving safely.
Plus, when you factor in all of the costs of owning and properly maintaining a car, a subscription service probably saves you money.
Fewer cars does not mean fewer cars on the road. Autonomous cars means more cars driving on the road at any given time as now you have empty cars going from person to person. It’s less safe from a total VMT perspective. And they sure as hell will use this as an excuse to not give us mass transit.
I don’t disagree there
We’ll have our walkable cities for sure at this rate.
We’ll have more people walking in cities, anyway.
Walkin down the stroad
Futures so bright I have to wear shades
This has been news for 6 years… Associated Press really did axe their employees to think this is a story.
Does US media know the difference between average and mean or median?
Yes and they use them all to get you to click.
I’m not fretting, I’m simply not buying anything other than necessities until Pedolf is gone. I’ll have a nice little pile of cash ready to go, assuming this nightmare ever ends.
For purchases that can be deferred without it being too painful, it’s probably a good idea on purely financial grounds, since some of purchases now are going to go towards taxation, paying tariffs. Trump’s earlier tariffs were overturned by the courts, but now courts are looking at the new, global, 10% tariff. Assuming that a future administration will roll back tariffs (or, I suppose, if courts overturn this and later attempts by the present administration at imposing tariffs) the same money would go further then.
Oh totally. I’m mostly doing it to create a financial buffer against uncertainty and because I want to do my (very small) part to damage Pedolf’s economy.
I really had to take a hard look at my spending habits. I determined that I can probably shift at least 75% of nonfood/grocery purchases to secondhand goods like clothing, appliances, tools, furniture . I can’t do much about services (and don’t really want to since they are local businesses) but prices are still higher and I have some savings goals to meet that I had to decrease d/t increase in the cost of basic living (groceries, fuel, electric/gas). There are also some items I want to purchase for independence in case of emergency events since FEMA is basically useless now (eg. like a solar generator, a water tank with manual pump, rain barrel system, garden fencing, woodchipper, trailer hitch for car and wagon trailer, solar ebike) so I need to save because I am not willing to go into debt.
There is always a choice. If those overweight SUVs would be resting like lead in the showrooms and only the smallest and most cost effective offers actually move, producers would adapt. They aren’t. (I am aware that producers do their best to advertise those high margin oversized cars but that doesn’t change the above).
In Europe we have been seeing a similar trend, for some time. However I am happy to report that this appears to be changing right now. Not long ago, almost all new EVs were some oversized and overweight SUV stuff for fantasy prices. Finally however, we are starting to see more and more compact EVs that are practical, reasonably sized and relatively reasonably priced as well. Take the Renault 5 and soon the Renault Twingo for example. The former in a good version with big battery 33k EUR, the latter 20k EUR.
One of the main considerations when my wife and I got our larger car was all the other larger cars in the road. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of texting soccer mom’s Escalade in a subcompact.
Are there actual studies proving that the risk to your life is truly meaningfully increased, more than lets say by voluntarily mildly speeding or being distracted by talking to others in the car etc? To me this sounds a lot like paranoia where people are readily increasing the lethal risk for others (pedestrians, especially children, cyclists etc) for mildly reducing their own risk and then they use all kind of feel good ideas to justify that to themselves.
Honestly, people driving huge vehicles are usually distracted by their phones and the amount of accidents dt that are pretty high. They hit pedestrians and cyclists (both bicycles and motorbikes) as well as other autos. One has to be very alert. There are also the assholes who speed weaving in and out of traffic cutting you off that you have to be alert to. Additionally, we have a lot of drivers under the influence since pot became legal.
That relativism is just false. There are very meaningful differences between tall oversized SUVs and non-oversized regular cars. First of all, sight is significantly worse, seeing pedestrians, especially children is harder and when an accident occurs the likelihood of the victim being pushed below the car instead of landing on the hood is much higher. All of that leads to significantly higher lethality rates with SUVs, not because people in there are more distracted but because SUVs are more deadly in case of accidents and make it harder for drivers to avoid accidents.
I don’t feel like one should need a study to tell them which will win between a 2000lbs car and a 4000lbs truck that sits higher. But here you go:
“We typically find that smaller vehicles have high driver death rates because they don’t provide as much protection, especially in crashes with larger, heavier SUVs and pickups,” said IIHS President David Harkey.
That’s not a study, it is a quote from a local news source (that can’t even manage to be not blocked in Europe). The quote is also oddly unspecific and the subsequent example given is of an outdated car with lacking safety features, not sold like that anymore.
Anyhow, if big cars are the problem, than the solution is not to increase the problem but to regulate deadly big cars. Why do you think car traffic lethalities in Europe are actually decreasing, even though cars are getting bigger, while in the US there is a stark increase in road lethalities even though most people are driving oversized and overweight cars?
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Kelley Blue Book isn’t a local news source, or even a news source at all. They specifically deal with cars.
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The article was about a yearly study done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
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Since I control the world I’ll get right on making sure everybody else has a smaller car and not doing what I can currently to about my wife’s safety on the road.
Seriously, why are you even taking this position?
Ad 1: It is blocked in the EU. Usually only local offers with little international presence can’t be bothered to be GDPR compliant and block their site for the EU.
Ad3: Have you looked at your source? It looks quite a bit different from the undifferentiated claim that driving small cars leads to a “high” chance of death in an accident. Even the smallest cars have not become more dangerous than in the past. The opposite is the case, they have gotten safer even with all the oversized cars around and are nowadays safer than big cars were in 2000. What is also shown in the graph is that the longest cars (relative to width) had lower death rates but only the very longest. 2/3 of the graph show no change that looks larger than the fluctuation. The trend line is having a very poor correlation with the data points.
At the same time the death rates due to traffic accidents are exploding recently in the US. So you are trading a bit of extra safety for yourself for more deaths of others on the roads. No you don’t need to control the world. Driving safely in a car of any size is what signficantly reduces your risks for you and for others. All modern cars are very safe. Moderately oversized cars are not safer at all, extremely oversized cars are a bit safer but much unsafer for everyone else. Your choice.
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Good thing my daily driver is a bike.
Seems like the average is inflated with $100,000 extended cab pickup trucks with luxury features. Which have taken over the market.
New vehicles now sell for an average of nearly $50,000
The share of vehicles listing for less than $30,000 is about 13%
So you can get a car for less than 30k, but those models don’t seem to be in high demand
I was gonna say this as well. The average is $50k but no one is forcing you to buy the average priced car. The low cost end of that range is still under $30k (for now). You can still get a reliable Toyota/Honda/Subaru/Mazda sedan or compact SUV with that. What’s actually already disappearing are the under $20k cars. My Kia Soul back in 2020 was just $19k.
Sitting at a Toyota dealership this moment waiting on the hybrid I’m interested in to come back so I can test drive it. The list price is like $34,000 with a number of extras.
I drive for work (hospice) so I put on the miles, and it’s just that time.
A brand new motorcycle is only a few thousand. They basically pay for themselves in fuel costs after a year or two.
New? Maybe a Chinese scooter around here. Cheapest motorcycle i can think of is 5k not to mention all the bs dealer fees the bike shops charge. Then there’s the fact that auto drivers care less and pay less attention to motorcycles than ever before. They seem to have the mentality of “it their fault for riding a motorcycle”. Meanwhile you’re splattered across the road. I miss my bike but no way i’d ride around here.
Chinese? A Kawasaki Ninja 500 is beginner friendly and has an MSRP of $5,4000. Add another $1k to get kitted out with a decent helmet and gear. So maybe $6,500 overall to get you started with a bike that does 50mpg.
You’re gonna get dealer fees with a car or a bike so the difference is negligible, same goes for taxes or anything else on top of the MSRP. Either way that’s over $40k saved going off the $50k car pricemark. Add another $40k or $80k to the car’s price depending on how poorly you financed it.
Those car prices go nuts once you add in the financing.
I don’t believe others being unsafe is a valid reason not to consider motorcycles as the same can be said for bicycles or any other mode of personal transportation that’s not a car.
Your post said a few thousand. My point was there is no bike for a few thousand anymore. Even the Honda Rebel is insane. Dealer fees on a bike are crazy. Assembly, inspection, pleasure of us fucking you over fee. It’s ridiculous. As to others being unsafe. That’s a personal decision. The area i was in at the time i quit riding is pretty much heavens waiting room and those fuckers would intentionally pull out in front of you.
Also funeral bills are cheaper than hospital bills.
Plus there’s a perpetual shortage of organ donors
Carbrained bikehate. Normalizing motorcycle use and road safety reduces squid-like behavior.
Lol squid-like? What’s that mean? I haven’t heard that one before.
Squids are the people you see on a motorcycle wearing a hoodie and tennis shoes.
Treating all motorcycle riders as “organ donors” ignores the millions who ride safely wearing all the gear all the time. You wouldn’t refer to all car drivers the same way you would an army recruit fresh out of boot camp with a new mustang, so why would you do so with motorcycle riders?
Motorcycles are a legitimate form of transportation.
Yep. There’s always a new crop of motorcycle riders who think they’re the greatest thing.
Ever been to a country where motorbikes are just a normal form of transport, for both 16 year old race boy and 75 year old great grandma?
Get them hooked then raise the price.
