No one has any money. Expect more articles like this

Maybe everyone shouldn't have a car anyway. Turn on the satellite layer in Google maps sometime, and you'll see how it's affected everything about how we organize society. Life for most humans is just sitting in various boxes only accessible by car, interspersed by car rides between them.

We're a species of motile organisms. Not only do we have legs, to not use them is actively unhealthy. If we're going to just sit in chairs all the time, we might as well get rid of all this useless leg biomass and redesign our houses and offices accordingly.

It's worse than this though, because that's just the physical dimension to our existence. The car is a mediating apparatus that alienates man from his social field. Man is a social animal, and needs sociality to maintain mental stability. If there's always a car between you and members of your own species, intersubjective experiences will simply occur less, which is exactly what happened when everyone got one.

It’s surprising to me how expensive cars are. There was the Covid spike, but prices have stayed high. I suppose the manufacturers understand demand enough, but I’ve had friends buy cars recently and they didn’t even consider new cars.

$30k for a new Honda Covic seems off. $25k for a 10 year old civic seems even crazier.

Why have cars become so expensive?

My understanding is that the used car market was gutted by "cash for clunkers" style government programs

Used to be more used cars on lots, so used cars were more affordable

May not be the whole story but it seems likely it played a part

Cars are not expensive. A $60,000 car, when calculated for inflation, costs the same as a $30,000 care did in 2000. What's not kept up is wages, including the minimum wage, for most of America. Had the Epstein class allowed wages to grow alongside inflation, as had been done since 1950, nobody would be complaining about affordability.