> Here's the source The headline stipulates "new vehicles" and the figure it cites is $9,282 (outside of the $10-12K range). The article isn't dated, but I ass

> Here's the source The headline stipulates "new vehicles" and the figure it cites is $9,282 (outside of the $10-12K range). The article isn't dated, but I assume it's referencing some time period during the pandemic in which car prices are unusually inflated due to supply chain issues--the figure for a normal year is almost certainly going to be lower than this (at least when adjusting for inflation). This is even less useful than the overall average car payment since it's even more biased toward affluent Americans. > The big things people forget is the cost of insurance in addition to consumables and depreciation. Yeah, I forgot insurance too, but that's $1200/year for my brand new Tesla in a major metropolitan city. I'm pretty sure full coverage for our hypothetical used Camry is going to be closer to $300/year, bringing the figure up to the ~$2300/year range (still a far cry from $10-12K). > Note that the vast majority of the population lives in areas where this is an issue. The number of people who are truly rural is a lot smaller than the number of people who live in cities or their suburbs and still end up paying for things like parking. Agreed that the majority of Americans are either suburban or rural; I'm skeptical that suburban land costs resemble urban land costs; however, regarding your claim that off-street parking costs upwards of $1000/year, according to Bloomberg the total cost of urban land for an average parking space is only $2000k (obviously there's costs for paving and maintaining, but I doubt the total costs come close to $1k/year averaged across the country). Ultimately, my point is: "your figures seem off by an order of magnitude". > My position isn't that someone should _ban_ cars but that we stop heavily subsidizing them and start factoring in pollution, too. Fully agree that we should factor in pollution, but why stop at car ownership? We should factor in the cost of pollution to everything, via border-adjusted carbon pricing.