'Rich People Killed America's Affordable Cars'

"Even if you're more than aware that new cars are super expensive, you may be shocked to learn that no automaker in the U.S. currently offers a new car for less than $20,000 anymore. Unless you get lucky and find some new old stock marked down below MSRP, the least-expensive new car you can buy is the Hyundai Venue, which, for the 2026 model year, costs $22,150 with destination. Yikes. It's one thing for cheap sedans to disappear, but we somehow lost cheap vehicles in general. But what happened? According to a recent deep dive from the New York Times, you can blame the rich."

"The author quite literally argues that the reason new cars are so expensive these days is because political decisions made since the 1970s brought us to a point where the highest earners have enough disposable income to keep buying those pricier cars, and automakers would rather cater to them instead of building cars with lower profit margins that someone making regular money could afford:"

"What happened? How did a basic necessity of American life become a luxury good? We have to start with a transformation of the economy itself beginning in the late 1970s. While hourly compensation for the typical worker remained nearly stagnant, massive stock market bull runs and rising home equity have enriched the most affluent households. Today, there are so many wealthy people who can afford luxury cars that it simply isn't that profitable for companies to produce cars for the bottom 40 percent of Americans by income."

Continued at link:

https://www.jalopnik.com/2147723/rich-people-killed-americas-affordable-cars/