[eru]

Here in Singapore, we only have about 1 million licenses for cars total. They are auctioned off to the highest bidder.

So there are no cheap-o $25k cars. (The car itself might be cheap, but you need the license to run it.)

My description in this context is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but this is actually a great system given the limited road space we have here. And auctioning off the licenses is about the most economically efficient way to allocate them.

[shiroiuma]

Here in Tokyo, they do things a little differently (and pretty sensibly I think): you simply can't own and register a car in the city unless you have a place to park it. So you have to get some kind of proof from the police showing they've certified you have a parking space that will fit the car, and they come out with a measuring tape to check too, based on the car's actual dimensions. So if you can afford a parking place, you can own a car. Otherwise, no. So car prices are subject to market forces and not artificially constrained; the constraint is the actual land area available for parking, and that's subject to market forces too, since it could be used for something else like a building, so parking tends to be expensive.