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.
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.
That’s really cool! I kinda feel like I remember this in places of PlaneScape: Torment, too?
A good soundscape adds so much to the experience. :)
(Note to self: go back and actually finish those games now…)
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.
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…
This has been news for 6 years… Associated Press really did axe their employees to think this is a story.
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.
The rest of the world will just buy Asian cars and get on with it.
I really love my e-bike more with every day
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
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.
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.
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
We’ll have our walkable cities for sure at this rate.
We’ll have more people walking in cities, anyway.
Futures so bright I have to wear shades
Walkin down the stroad
Wouldn’t it have been nice if the US had a mass-transit system like Europe or China? Oh well.
The mass transit system in Europe is inadequate, even.
Inadequate is hardly the word and extremely harsh for a system that most people benefit greatly from.
Most people don’t really benefit from it because it is inadequate and needs to be greatly expanded
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get them hooked then raise the price.
Those buyers, he said, are being pushed into the used market.
Haha yes that’s what we did too, we could buy a new car for the same we paid for a 4 year old car. But we wanted to be able to pull a trailer, and we wanted a better than minimum battery, and the luxury of the bigger car is of course nice too. 😋
We got the VW ID.4 a CUV which means it’s built like a real car, not some pickup truck construction that avoids regulation, that American SUV’s often are.The CUV is an amazing drive with perfect handling, an SUV is not.
usedproven.drives off in his Civic Si with multiple possible engine swap possibilities without even changing the ECU
I have enough set aside to make it the Civic Si of Theseus when I’m 72.
/me pushes his chips forward
Let it ride. If gas doesn’t pan out even WORSE to where Civic drivers are scrounging, I’ll scrap it and drop what I’m holding on an EV, until then!
without even changing the ECU
Wow that’s impressive, and it’s also a very nice car to drive I imagine from what I’ve heard.
Heck yeah. I’ve had a lifetime Honda streak. :)
I really… really wish I didn’t accidentally doom my Honda Element by stripping that stupid (“goose neck”?) bolt holding the VVT solenoid in the engine.
It was 219, and I could’ve kept it going to 300,000 at least otherwise. :(
Got a very good-enough CR-V now that just does the thing. Can’t complain I guess. Has a middle back seat! But it’s not my Element. :(
I am on my first Honda, a CRV. I bought it during COVID 2021 new because all the used cars were going for new car prices and the new cars… there were not many of them d/t supply train issues. So I went for something that would last a long time and retain more value than a Chevy (which I drove before that and most Chevy’s would last maybe 10 years before major expensive repairs started their siphon on my bank account.
I just bought a very lightly used BRZ (20k miles) for $27k and I thought I was splurging because I could have paid significantly less for a completely adequate car, but I wanted something fun. It cost me more than an SUV would have, so even people who want practical cars aren’t being forced to spend over $30k.
