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Are new cars not less affordable now? I mean a new car in 2022 averaged $48,080. A new car in 1980 was something like $8,025 or $23,920 in inflation adjusted dollars. Part of this is consumer behavior and non-emissions or efficiency improvements. "CPI: New Vehicles" already "corrects" for quality improvements including emissions or efficiency improvements, so shouldn't be used to compare affordability.
That is an interesting point. Not sure how to properly control for cars lasting longer, making new cars even more of a luxury item as used cars are not as bad, but that certainly suggests that cars really are getting less affordable. Also not sure how to judge how much of the cost increases are specifically due to emissions or efficiency improvements as opposed to other improvements like safety and convenience features. Maybe trying to compare the prices of the cheapest new cars over time instead of the average? Required safety features would still get priced in, but I guess they should be considered in the question of whether cars are being legislated out of affordability.
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There's no reason to buy a cheap new car today, you can buy a used car instead.
My wife, my parents, my sister, my brother in law, and myself all make six figures. The newest car in the group is a 2018. The average is roughly 2013. And I don't feel deprived in any way.
Cars used to break down at 100k miles. And features used to vastly improve every ten years. Now we all drive ten year old cars and they have Bluetooth and abs and airbags.
New cars are more comfortable, with no degradation of the frame or suspension, and there is no question about maintenance or accident history. Used cars are also rarely as good a deal as people think they are. People still want $15k for their 10-year-old basic options sedans because “they changed the oil regularly.”
It is objectively false that there is no reason to buy a new car over a used one. Both choices have their advantages.
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This has been true for quite some time; the average car in 2010 was 10 years old as well (it's crept up to 11-12 years since then).
Unfortunately for us, manufacturers have figured out that they can just stop updating the software for the screens (and in Tesla's case, accidentally burn the hardware out by writing so much telemetry data to the integrated flash storage). The car still works fine; the radio not so much.
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When I was car shopping last year, this was very much not the case, due to the supply chain issues. We ended up buying new and waiting several months, despite preferring something a bit older and less expensive, because used cars cost about the same as new ones. Some used cars cost more than used ones last summer, because there wasn't a waiting list.
The situation may have started to clear up by now, though.
This is true precisely because of my point: used cars today are about as good as new cars. This was simply not true twenty years ago, or even ten years ago. There used to be some really shitty cars on the market. Growing up the used cars were stuff like the Neon, the Cavalier, the first gen Ford Exploder, the Jeep Cherokee. Of course, being middle aged now, I'm growing nostalgic for some of those cars, but they were real junk in a lot of ways. Used to be that bottom end old cars got to 60 in "eventually;" had self changing oil by 80k, were junk or Ships of Theseus by 150k, were pigs on gas if they were larger than a Focus, were loud and uncomfortable and ugly. As a result they lost value quickly as better, faster, prettier cars came on the market. Sports cars went through such a revolution between 1995 and 2012 or so that every five years cars were noticeably faster and better handling.
Today that simply isn't the case. Even mom-mobiles are generally fast enough that the limitation is the driver's willingness to press down on the gas moreso than the car's capability to hit higher speeds. Most of the creature comforts like heated seats, ABS, bluetooth audio, GPS, rearview cameras were standard equipment on mid-high end models by 2015 so it's not something you need to go new for. Car design was in a much better place 2010-2015 than it was 1980-2005, so used cars look better than they used to, and improved paint prevents that sun-faded look old trucks used to get. ((Maybe I'm just crotchety, but I also think that car design has gone into decline in the last couple years as companies compete to be more EXTREME on the one end, more aggressive and less friendly all around, and all the SUVs start to look like fish.))
Either this is just an amusing typo, or there's some lore here I may have forgotten.
Also, to your point, it's fascinating that cars today have bigger power numbers and bigger fuel economy numbers than cars of the 90's or even the 2010's. The Buick Regal GS(?) had a turbo-4 engine good for like 270 HP (at least, as advertised) and even that is kind of hum-drum now. A compact SUV from today probably has just as much torque as a V8-powered F-150 from the 90's.
I think even 2000's cars have started to get that weird paint crust from age that I used to associate with beat-up 90's cars. Time will tell how cars from the past decade hold up in another 10 years.
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