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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.
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
Yeah that was my first thought. How much is this influenced by 7 or 8 year loans on $70,000 trucks?
While that is clearlya problem behavior, has it really changed? The same people willing to put that much down on a luxury truck with a loan they can’t afford, would have done the same last year
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
My brother had an old Plymouth Horizon that made it to the mid-40s mpg, and there were only one or two cars better.
…. And it was made with aluminum foil. You didn’t want to be in an accident with those
I’m with you, best I know is 88 Jetta diesel at 48mpg (@40 years old)
And American car/vehicle manufacturers are crying over low sales.
Stupid
Isn’t BYD a fraction of this cost, but we’re propping up stakeholder bonuses in Detroit?
I say this with all my heart. /c/fuckcars.
Hopefully it’s a temporary blip from EV incentives going away. We needed those incentives to smooth out the transition while EVs are still expensive, but with them being cancelled anyone on the fence had to consider buying in september.
Now we’ll transition slower and more painfully. We’ll continue pushing climate change, to our own detriment. Legacy manufacturers are already pulling back from EVs to maximize short term profit at the cost of viability on the global market. More people will be stuck for decades with obsolete technology and higher operating cost. We always seem to like doing things the hard way
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.
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.
Maybe if they stopped putting a CPU in every car they wouldn’t cost so much and have less problems. Can I get roll down windows and a bare bones car for $15k new ? Make it modular or easily repairable or something so ppl can keep replacing parts on it and it can last indefinitely or something??
