I don’t understand how people keep buying new cars when shitty ones are $50k. Even these $100k SUV’s are poorly built and tons of issues.
People are so stupid now, they prefer comfort and ease over using their damn heads and not buying crap.
Land Rovers. Why.
They’re not. Lots are full of old inventory. One superstore near me has “new” 2023 model year units in the lot. Still above MSRP.
But Trump said only beef was expensive anymore, did he lie to me?
I get what you are saying. But we live in a society without a lot of alternatives. No walking neighborhoods. No or little public transportation. Some people don’t have options if they have to leave their house.
I say this with all my heart. /c/fuckcars.
Inflation: how does it work?
Not only that, there’s just so many huge vehicles full of tech. Not enough people want basic simple transportation anymore, or at least there aren’t enough models to choose from.
It seems like automakers would much rather sell fewer premium and luxury units at higher margins than sell more units of affordable cars at lower margins. I suppose I understand why, but it does leave a large consumer segment unserved. That seems like a good opportunity for a competitor to come in and serve the unserved market, but none of the big legacy car brands seem interested and new car companies don’t have access to the capital it would take to build the manufacturing capacity necessary to mass produce affordable vehicles.
Sounds like a great opportunity for foreign car companies, from, say, China, for instance, to come in and serve that under served lower end of the market. But then, tariffs.
There’s still lots of money to be made in the used car market. Make new cars expensive, then more people will lease. Then you have a constant stream of income and you can raise the prices on your used leased cars.
Used cars are also entering a bubble.
Abused, falling apart, shit boxes are selling for what a decent used car was 5 years ago, and decent used cars are the price of a new car 5 years ago, yet basically no one is earning enough to afford the difference.
More auto loans are underwater than ever before, and a lot of them are for used cars. Eventually something’s gonna have to give.
There’s a reason that Obama pushed so hard to bail out the auto industry during the financial crisis. If the car market fails, it means less able bodied Americans will be able to get to their jobs due to how our entire country is structured. If the Auto industry fails, America will slowly grind to a halt.
This is coming before Christmas next year. Many researchers say the auto loan industry right now is worse than both the 2000 and 2008 crashes. So the trump 2026 crash could destroy the entire country if millions of loans are defaulted and the government is broke.
Capitalism serves capital, not the needs of the people. And the free market of competition is just a convenient myth with which to distract people.
10ish years ago it was a conscious choice they made, the automakers.
Now?
They are trapped, they can only continue to exist if they have the margins from luxury car prices for basically standard cars.
The other thing that goes along with this is… horrendously shoddy construction and design, they’re literally built to break down, intentionally.
They’re not really automakers.
They’re managers of very troubled tranches of debt obligations who happen to be in charge of auto plants.
We should have let them all die back in 09, but instead we bailed them out and their management became a punch of sycophantic ‘dont rock the boat, we’re experts’ accountants, just like what happened Boeing after McDonnel Douglass bought them out, ousted their middle and upper managers, and wore the Boeing brand name like a skin suit.
They are completely incompetent, but even if they weren’t, nobody could solve the mess they are in now after decades of coddling and kickbacks from the government, collusion with regulators… rotted them from the inside out, smothered themselves, not really caring because C suite gets golden parachutes no matter what happens.
Your last sentence underscores one of my main frustrations with this system of corporate enshittification. No matter what happens, there is no such thing as real life consequences for the c suite. They do as they please and retire comfortably without a care in the world.
And the inescapable logic there means that unless people put their own credible threat of violence on the table, nothing will continue to ever change.
You don’t play a rigged poker game, you play the uh, meta-game, around and above it, otherwise, you always lose.
Capitalism does violence via complex bureaucracy, via obscuring and normalizing the system itself, by making it very complicated to try to draw some kind of moral line as to where responsibility for the acts of which actors in a system should lie.
The reality is that the system itself is violence, and that you are guilty to the degree that you partake in and profit from it.
This is why Luigi Mangione is pretty much seen as the modern day Robin Hood.
Large margins and small supply are a lot easier to deal with though, and mass production is very expensive to set up.
Honestly we need regulation in this space. Incentivize building a cheap car so the manufacturers will do it.
Honestly the gov is in a good place to do this. Spec out a vehicle and place an order for a could hundred thousand of the them for general purpose government worker transportation needs. Set a low cost target. Let them build it for normal people too.
“It’s because of those EVs” says man driving $70,000 pickup as his daily driver
A new RWD base Model 3 is 36,990
It’s really because of tariffs.
China has EVs with 300km range that only cost $15,000. Can’t buy them in the US, though.
Gotta give the Musks your money, instead.
Cheapest BYD in Finland is an used 2023 model with 50k kilometers and costs 28k USD.
In Australia, that model costs $28k USD brand new!
https://evdealergroup-byd.com.au/configurator/byd-atto-3?postcode=2071&store=380&state=NSW
There are tariffs on Chinese EVs in the EU as well.
Hyundai’s EVs are so much better than tesla’s
Yeah that was my first thought. How much is this influenced by 7 or 8 year loans on $70,000 trucks?
Unironically, to a degree. 40 years ago, you could buy an economy car from an American dealer that got 70 mpg. Now you can buy a car twice the size with an enormous block of lithium as its fuel tank.
What model? Best normal USDM car I can think of was the Civic/CRX which hit the 40s. I rented a 2025 civic and got 49mpg (NOT a hybrid), so we’re back to that, at least. Geo Metro was rated for the 50s and hypermilers did better, but keep in mind the EPA ratings took a nosedive with more accurate testing around 2005
I’m with you, best I know is 88 Jetta diesel at 48mpg (@40 years old)
Isn’t BYD a fraction of this cost, but we’re propping up stakeholder bonuses in Detroit?
This is such a tired argument. Literally the only remaining US automakers are GM, Ford, and Tesla. A vast majority of car sales in the US are foreign brands not domestic. BYD is being propped up just the same as what you’re claiming here, which is why no other automaker in the world outside of China is able to beat these Chinese prices, so how is this alternative better for anyone?
China is doing this in order to dominate the market wherever they’re allowed to enter, and are well equipped to undercut those local markets for as long as it takes to put everyone else out of business. They control a majority of the minerals needed for EVs so they get to set the external and internal price. They have lax safety and environmental regulations. They already control much of the world’s manufacturing capacity. They’re a massive country with a massive workforce.
Allowing them to dominate the world auto market in order to buy one or two cheap new cars (before prices shoot back up because monopoly) is going to be bad for everyone.
Respectfully, protectionism isn’t that much better. In terms of economic velocity (efficient use of money/value/resources), it would be better if we used the money in other industries.
- “The Chinese are competitive.” Yup, they are beating the global
- ”They own the materials.” Yup, good planning on their part
- ”They have lax safety.” Nope.
- ”Massive country & workforce.” And a bunch of Chinese manufacturing has reduced humans and/or are dark with no humans.
“Allowing them to sell superior products is bad.” Sure, for the stakeholders. Not for Americans. I’m already being screwed by capitalists all over the place. Let’s expedite capitalism’s demise, please.
I think they mean lax labor safety. It’s much cheaper to make things if you don’t worry about your workers getting killed or injured at higher rates.
You don’t seem to be accounting for the strategic value of the car industry, which is what the person above was talking about.
Yup. Once they drive everyone else out of business, the only affordable car will be from them, and they’ll have you by the balls.
More governments need to enact tariffs on imports like these in order to prevent that. Subsidizing and dumping products is terrible for the global population, and it happens by and in many, many countries around the world.
Adjusted for inflation, or better yet something like median salary, would probably be more meaningful.
Seems this will preferentially screw folks in low cost of living areas. If you’re in a HCOL/VHCOL area and making ends meet, then a new car is probably affordable. If you’re making ends meet in a LCOL area, then this is likely a huge expense.
And American car/vehicle manufacturers are crying over low sales.
Stupid
I was going to make a comment about cheap Chinese cars, but then I checked the BYD price list, and the Dolphin is the only car they’re offering for less than $50k. The rest are a pretty even distribution between 50 and 100k pre-add-on fees and taxes and trims.
BYD tends to be higher end (although the Seagull comes in around $11k). If you want a cheaper compact, try a Geely Xing Yuan or Chery Arrizo ($8k-13k range). For a sportier economy car, there’s the Xiaomi SU7 ($30k).
The big catches with these cars is that they’re far smaller than their American equivalents.
The bigger catches with most of the smaller cars is that they wouldn’t pass an NHTSA inspection. Of course, if big cars didn’t exist, they might — but there’s lots of commercial vehicles on the roads that aren’t SUVs or pickup trucks that still might collide with a lightweight vehicle.
WTYP had a great episode on the end of the small American car, with the failure of the Ford Pinto.
The American auto industry basically doesn’t make small cars anymore. So much of the modern car price is just the volume of car you’re required to purchase.
Honestly, whatever.
Americans make shit cars anyways.
If people who can’t afford them stopped paying for new cars and just bought cars they can afford and everyone agreed to never pay dealer markups, car companies wouldn’t be so brazenly pushing prices higher.
