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New-Vehicle Avg Price Hits Record High in Sep, Surges Past $50k for First Time
- panny 1y agoI fortunately am unaffected by this. I choose to live where I do not need a car in the US.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thepryz 1y agoNot everyone has that luxury due to commitments and priorities and not everyone enjoys or even thrives living in the city so I'm not sure what value this adds. I always find it interesting how smug people who live in the city and/or have little experience in rural America can be about these kinds of topics.
- tylerflick 1y agoThis. I was fortunate to be able to have the choice to leave, but it wasn’t always this way. I often reflect on what it was like to have constant dread of the next auto repair I would have to pay for.
- panny 1y ago>I always find it interesting how smug people who live in the city and/or have little experience in rural America can be about these kinds of topics. Allow me to be extra smug then. I live in a small town with an Amtrak station. It was hard work finding this place, but well worth it to me. It means I never have to drive an automobile again. That makes me happy.
- johnea 1y agoNo wonder Detroit doesn't want sub-$10K chinese EVs in the US 8-/
- oblio 1y agoThey don't even need to be Chinese EVs. Europeam and Asian brands are selling €15k small cars in Europe that pass European safety standards, comparable to the US ones. My guess is that it is another form if hidden predictionism, even though Americans desperately need cheap cars, just like they need cheap apartments.
- WillPostForFood 1y agoWhat European car can you get for €15k?
- Xylakant 1y agoPlenty: https://www.meinauto.de/lp-neuwagen-unter-15000-euro https://www.meinauto.de/lp-neuwagen-unter-15000-euro Depends on where you live, obviously, but I used to own a C3 (on the list) and it was a perfectly usable car.
- WillPostForFood 1y agoWhen I went to the site you listed, and checked the C3, it looked like the purchase price was much more than 15k. List price was 19k, and with Meinauto discount, 17.6k.
- Xylakant 1y agoFor me it offers 15000 plus transport to the dealership for the C3, but there’s plenty of other cars for less money on the list. Also: German prices, German taxes - the pricing is likely entirely different elsewhere.
- oblio 1y agohttps://www.dacia.ro/gama-dacia/logan.html https://www.dacia.ro/gama-dacia/logan.html https://www.dacia.ro/gama-dacia/sandero.html https://www.dacia.ro/gama-dacia/sandero.html https://www.dacia.ro/gama-dacia/sandero-stepway.html https://www.dacia.ro/gama-dacia/sandero-stepway.html https://www.whatcar.com/best/the-10-cheapest-new-cars-you-can-buy-reviewed-and-rated/n25148 https://www.whatcar.com/best/the-10-cheapest-new-cars-you-ca... The Dacia Logan and Sandero Stepway, especially, are quite usable as family cars.
- ramesh31 1y agoI just can't understand who is buying these cars. As a single person with a 90th percentile income and zero debt or dependents, I literally can't even comprehend having a $1,000 car payment. How anyone else is affording this just doesn't make sense.
- lossolo 1y agoIt's about keeping up with the Joneses.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Loughla 1y ago8 or 10 year loan. Then you roll that remainder into the next loan when you get another car. It's absurd, to be honest. We financed our last vehicle, because we got a price discount via financing. The FIRST payment term they brought us was 8 years. And this was for a 19k vehicle. People aren't looking at the terms, they're just looking at the payments. They're paying more for cars than they are for houses, monthly. I don't get it.
- ge96 1y agoMe sitting here with a 28% APR on my 11 year old car. My own doing bad credit but I did get the car I want through ACA.
- RandomBacon 1y ago> ACA Affordable Care Act?
- kube-system 1y agoMy guess is American Credit Acceptance... a subprime auto loan originator.
- quickthrowman 1y ago
- chasd00 1y agoI feel like they should also release the median price with the average. There are a lot of very expensive luxury/performance cars out there.
- cma 1y agoGoogle is pretty terrible for this, treats median as a synonym for avsrage and entire first page of results is just copies of this story.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoAll news/public relations/research publications without details about the distribution of the data are clickbait. It would cost nothing to provide deciles, or even quintiles.
- jeffbee 1y agoThat still would not really clarify the main question, which is whether the average transaction price may be rising due to consumer shift, with those of less means choosing to not buy.
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoKindof a side-bar — In most cases i strongly prefer median, any dataset with outliers or that is skewed in some direction is usually better represented by the median. And in my experiences most real-world datasets do have one or both of those.
- throwmeaway222 1y agoTechnically they are the same price they were 5 years ago if you account for inflation (25% over those 5 years). It's just that our wages have not kept up (we don't see 40k -> 50k as shrug money).
- baggy_trough 1y agoI guess I'm old fashioned but I buy cars up front for cash. I ain't paying 50K unless there's no other choice.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago> I guess I'm old fashioned but I buy cars up front for cash. A large portion of people buying cars barely have a couple thousand to put down for a down-payment. When you add in registration fees, sales tax, etc - a large portion of car owners can't do this without financing. Maybe none of them should be car owners - but most of them live in places where you have no option to get anywhere besides private vehicles, so...
- baggy_trough 1y agoThose people should buy older cars used. But if you only have a couple thousand to put down, you're going to have a bad time.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoYou can't get an older, function car - with sales tax and registration fees - for less than $2000. >50% of Americans have less than $2000 in savings: https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-well-being-of-us-households-in-2024-savings-and-investments.htm https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2025-economic-we...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- selimthegrim 1y agoI paid $1300 and another $320 in fees for a 20 year old car but this is New Orleans where no one maintains anything so there was further down the pike in short order.
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- actionfromafar 1y agoHow much of this is inflation?
- supportengineer 1y agoAccounting for inflation, the low-end cars are getting cheaper and you're getting more for your money.
- ajross 1y agoLess than zero. Car prices are dropping relative to other goods, though they've been mostly flat (in the sense of "inflating at the general rate") since 2010 or so. As always, just go to FRED to ask these questions. This graph charts the ratio of the "New Vehicles" CPI value to the "All Items" CPI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1N48P https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1N48P
- bigbadfeline 1y ago> Car prices are dropping relative to other goods That's the salesman's way of saying that other goods (like gas and now electricity) have been getting more expensive faster than cars. If you put 2 and 2 together, driving is getting considerably more expensive driven by more expensive cars and fuel, which one is rising faster is immaterial, inflation is the original problem but a used car salesman will find a way to use it to prove it doesn't exist.
- ajross 1y ago> driving is getting considerably more expensive driven by more expensive cars and fuel I'm at a loss. I literally showed you a graph showing that cars were getting cheaper over time. Do you not believe it, or maybe misunderstand what inflation is? You can chart new car price vs. median income too, it shows the same shape. Fuel's a little more complicated. It's gone up in the last decade, but was going down in the 60's through 90's (not least because cars were getting more efficient). There was a trough in the late 90's.
- supportengineer 1y agoInexpensive new cars are better than ever. Why not get a new Corolla or Civic and plan to keep it 10-15 years?
- jeffbee 1y agoI wish I did not have to point it out to 77.3 million American voters, but the entire point of tariffs, their only mode of operation, is to raise domestic prices.
- bigbadfeline 1y ago> I wish I did not have to point it out ... the entire point of tariffs... is to raise domestic prices. Trump has to point this out not you. Instead he promised this: “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods.” NBC Montana, Trump Rally in Bozeman
- smallerize 1y agoDoes this include GM buying a bunch of their own EVs so they can keep offering the federal rebate for another month?
- JojoFatsani 1y agoInflation: exists
- rufus_foreman 1y agoI've owned cars since the mid-1980's and I don't think I've spent $50k on all of them put together. Probably getting close to that now.