>The used car market has been pretty strange for the past few years. American automakers no longer make compact cars. Actually, they don't make full-size cars

>The used car market has been pretty strange for the past few years. American automakers no longer make compact cars. Actually, they don't make full-size cars either (with the sole exception of the Ford Mustang). Once you understand that, you understand why everything's fucked up. 20 years ago, each of the Big 3 would sell 6-figure sums of compact cars, all for less than 25K (inflation-adjusted). Turns out that they'd rather make 50K SUVs and 100K trucks instead. Part of that is safety and fuel economy standards that make it functionally illegal to turn a profit on a small car now (and electric compact cars that will be forced at gunpoint in the future will continue to be complete garbage range-wise simply because they don't have enough room for the batteries, so there's no point in designing one- customers already refuse to buy full-size EVs for this reason). Part of that was people getting used to negative interest rates, and US automakers tooling up to exploit that fact. Part of that is increased labor costs make it uneconomical to make an inexpensive car (which is specifically why the US bans imports of Chinese compact EVs- even if they passed safety regulations, which they don't). It's not actually possible to solve this in the short term; which is why the meta remains "buy a Corolla and drive it until the wheels fall off".