I say this with all my heart. /c/fuckcars.
Inflation: how does it work?
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.
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.
Ebikes will serve that market. Thant and expanded transit in some cities
And what about those of us for whom neither would be practical in their commute? I mean, e-bikes are great - I own one - but it’s for pleasure, not doing my commute when there’s no infra for it, nevermind the weather. And yeah, no practical public transit exists either.
I’m in the market for a car too, I’ll probably end up with some shitbox.
We need to step.up building good transit
As someone who just bought car last year, I think Kia is the closest one serving that market. We made a list of potential cars that had what we wanted. It had to be under $35k and it had to have certain features without needing to subscribe to some service. We added a few Kiad to our list and I’ll admit they were quite tempting as they had everything we wanted for less than all the other cars on our list. In the end we ended up getting a Prius, but the Kias were pretty close for us.
Subaru seems to give the customer a fair shake as well - I haven’t had issues with my vehicle or their supply chain, and checking their current prices they do have entry level (albeit a bit higher than the old floor) pricing.
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
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.
There are tariffs on Chinese EVs in the EU as well.
Hyundai’s EVs are so much better than tesla’s
I’m not trying to detract from your point because we could do this here as well but BYD cars are not $15k outside if china even where you can but them. They are that cheap because the government incentives them to be so.
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.
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
Crying over fewer high margin sales. They want the same number of sales but with more profit.
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.
I like small cars anyways. America has an auto obesity crisis. Older small cars have a charm that bloated crossovers don’t
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.
Pricing ppl out of vehicles can only be good for the environment, right?
Keep the pedal pressed all the way down ya oligarch buffoons😂Good way to reduce peoples mobility as well. Can’t have them “voting with their feet” now.
