A lot of that is that Americans are buying trucks, not cars. It’s easy to stay under $30k with a sedan, but a sizable group of people think they need the image of driving a full-sized pickup truck to the office and each 7 year loan on an $80k truck is going to drive the average up, not to mention leaving the buyer more cash-strapped due to the higher operating costs.
My favorite is the people who whine about gas prices, when they chose to deliberately shoot themselves in the foot daily by buying a GMC Yukon or something instead of a sedan. To mostly commute to work, but oh no, they need a monster truck because they might have 1.5 children in it occasionally. And everyone knows sedans don't have back seats or cargo space.
The average has just gone past $50l but it is not clear it will stay there. There are a few things that drove it up recently.
One contributor was a surge in EV sales to beat the expiration of the tax credits. EVs on average cost more than non-EVs so that pushed the average up. EVs were almost 12% of September sales with an average price of $58k.
There are plenty of EVs a lot lower that than that, so why was the average EV so high? That brings is to another contribution: in general it was upper-end buyers who currently dominate the market (the potential lower end buyers are probably too worried about the economy and maybe the likely big increases in health insurance for 2026 to buy a car now). Upper end buyers tend to go for the more luxurious cars, whether they are buying an ICE or EV.
Remember though, just because the average is about $50k doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of good new cars for a lot less. A 2026 Toyota Corolla has a base MSRP of $22 725. For $24 575 you can get the hybrid which increases the MPG from 32 city/41 highway to 53 city/46 highway.
Yeah the average is high, that means there are cars cheaper than that. People are spending big because they either are doing no researchand getting suckered, or they are buying nicer cars for vanity reasons.
Americans are really dumb and do next to no research on most purchases. I know several people who think that's a waste of time. The best that a lot of folks can do is a YouTube video.
Throw money at the problem. Learn nothing. Complain when things go bad.
That's what a ton of Americans do now and it's wild seeing it as often as I do. There was recently that Ars article that looked at a study showing how bad anti-intellectualism in this country has become. Being dumb is now a sort of prideful thing for a lot of Americans.
> 10 years ago you could go onto a lot and buy a brand new Dodge Dart for around $17,000.
$17k 10 years ago is $23k today. That's under the MSRP of a 2026 Toyota Corolla.
In constant dollars car prices for comparable trim levels of similar styles of car have actually been have been pretty steady for the last 40 years or so. The average car is a lot more expensive now in constant dollars because the mix of cars bought has shifted significantly toward larger and more luxurious cars.
For example when I was looking for a new car earlier this year I looked at the Honda Civic. When I compared the price to my last Civic, which I bought in 1989, it was about the same after correcting for inflation since 1989. I also looked at the CR-V, and when comparing to my 2006 CR-V today's CR-V after correction for inflation since 2006 is actually about 5-10% cheaper.
Automakers realized during the pandemic they could increase prices and reduce production and come out ahead. Import tariffs means you are, as a consumer, held captive by a domestic market to extract from you for your potentially non discretionary personal transportation needs. If you must have a car, the price is the price.
This has slowly been changing as of recently, but now tariffs are eating into automaker balance sheets to the tune of ~$30B, which will have to come from somewhere in transaction volume.
A few years ago my car was totaled by an uninsured illegal in a hit and run, and I was forced to get another one (bought used). This was back when the bubble was even worse, and since I lived on dirt roads, I needed a 4x4. Literally the only thing I could find not clapped out were luxury models, because rich people were about the only people at the time dumping cars that weren't completely clapped out.