This was a weird piece because it starts with a focus on averages, cherry-picks the numbers to leave out cheaper options, and misses the main story: those cheap

This was a weird piece because it starts with a focus on averages, cherry-picks the numbers to leave out cheaper options, and misses the main story: those cheaper options are less common now because Americans started spending more to buy bigger, more “macho” vehicles. There’s an entire psychology class in the way people will take on 6+ year loans, which used to be a huge financial red-flag, to buy a luxury vehicle they can barely afford to maintain because the alternative is not looking like part of a celebrity’s caravan. It’s practically a cliche to hear moaning about gas prices and then find out that the person complaining is tooling around in a Yukon or F-150 which carries less than 2 people on average and rarely more than a bag of groceries. I don’t know if his work is funded by the Chinese auto industry or not but I do wish the point about transit had been stronger. Yes, there are many parts of the United States where that’s non-existent but a huge chunk of the population live in areas where transit or even biking to work would be possible but it’s socially stigmatized to the point that people will spend 20+% of their household income to avoid it.