The Affordable Car Is Dead. What Happened?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/13/opinion/affordable-car-cost.html

by JKCalhoun • 3 months ago

12 5 3 months ago

nytimes.com

weezing• 3 months ago

More like "The Affordable Car Is Dead in the US". We still have plenty of these in Europe.

bigbadfeline• 3 months ago

Tariffs and wars happened, weird the NYT didn't hear about it.

jrochkind1• 3 months ago

Been going on since before Trump II, as many of us have definitely noticed. (2020 was the last model year for Honda Fit).

Some info in article.

acdha• 3 months ago

This was a weird piece because it starts with a focus on averages, cherry-picks the numbers to leave out cheaper options, and misses the main story: those cheaper options are less common now because Americans started spending more to buy bigger, more “macho” vehicles. There’s an entire psychology class in the way people will take on 6+ year loans, which used to be a huge financial red-flag, to buy a luxury vehicle they can barely afford to maintain because the alternative is not looking like part of a celebrity’s caravan. It’s practically a cliche to hear moaning about gas prices and then find out that the person complaining is tooling around in a Yukon or F-150 which carries less than 2 people on average and rarely more than a bag of groceries.

I don’t know if his work is funded by the Chinese auto industry or not but I do wish the point about transit had been stronger. Yes, there are many parts of the United States where that’s non-existent but a huge chunk of the population live in areas where transit or even biking to work would be possible but it’s socially stigmatized to the point that people will spend 20+% of their household income to avoid it.

smarm52• 3 months ago

Winston received his A.B. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974

GenX / Boomer, so that explains some of it.

Millennial. As poor as we tend to be, "affordable" means something quite different to us as compared with other generations that had it easier. I've never actually seen a new "affordable car" since I started working. I always got used, and even then those were expensive for me.

The Affordable Car Is Dead. What Happened?

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