Maybe if they stopped putting a CPU in every car they wouldn't cost so much and have less problems. Can I get roll down windows and a bare bones car for $15k new ? Make it modular or easily repairable or something so ppl can keep replacing parts on it and it can last indefinitely or something??
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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I don't understand how people keep buying new cars when shitty ones are $50k. Even these $100k SUV's are poorly built and tons of issues.
People are so stupid now, they prefer comfort and ease over using their damn heads and not buying crap.
They're not. Lots are full of old inventory. One superstore near me has "new" 2023 model year units in the lot. Still above MSRP.
Hope they stay that way and they go bankrupt. The whole dealership idea is a scam.
Hopefully it’s a temporary blip from EV incentives going away. We needed those incentives to smooth out the transition while EVs are still expensive, but with them being cancelled anyone on the fence had to consider buying in september.
Now we’ll transition slower and more painfully. We’ll continue pushing climate change, to our own detriment. Legacy manufacturers are already pulling back from EVs to maximize short term profit at the cost of viability on the global market. More people will be stuck for decades with obsolete technology and higher operating cost. We always seem to like doing things the hard way
It's been 15 years, when exactly will EVs be cheaper? And why isn't it yet? I hear from the tankies that it's cause america won't let us buy cheap Chinese EVs. If that isn't why I don't get it. We went from blackberries to batteries that can run a computer faster than a desktop of the era for multiple days, but we can't sort out EVs? The core enabling technology (the transistors) aren't even that expensive. The obvious answer is capitalism but which part?
We could be there now. Arguably we started being there.
I’d argue the technology is ready for EVs to be cheaper and we just need to scale. As long as legacy manufacturers focus on legacy technologies and EVs are an afterthought, we’re not getting anywhere. Too many companies want to copy Tesla’s approach: produce a compelling high end product and use that to fund a more mass produced product. It worked for them and now they’re cheaper than ever, but Tesla does not produce a full range of vehicles. It seems to be working for Rivian as well: we’ll see as their midrange products roll out. Even Lucid seems to be successfully following that model. But legacy manufacturers struggled to create a flagship model that was actually compelling. And teslas business model can’t work for everyone. And their strategy has always been a full range of vehicles, but where are they?
The car market has overall gotten more expensive than any of us want to admit, but the Chevy bolt is cheaper than any traditional Subaru. Hyundais/Kia has some great EVs that many people can afford. Chevy equinox EV may be in the sweet spot, if only it were a compelling vehicle. Non-US manufacturers seem to have compelling lower cost EVs that somehow never make it to the US, and I’m not just talking China.
As long as legacy manufacturers like GM prefer to focus on their $80k 9,300 lb monstrosities their choice is keeping EV prices high. But the Equinox and Bolt proves they can make EVs in the same price range as their legacy technology vehicles. And the only problem, the only reason they claim a loss on each one is that they haven’t sold enough to make back development costs in their short time frame. That’s not going to change until it’s a serious effort. Not going to change as long as it’s a second thought, compliance vehicle, because they’re forced to.
This is why the incentives were so important. It’s not just to speed up the transition but to establish a stable and rapidly growing market to sell such vehicles, so they more quickly reach the scale to support lower prices and higher profitability
But Trump said only beef was expensive anymore, did he lie to me?
I get what you are saying. But we live in a society without a lot of alternatives. No walking neighborhoods. No or little public transportation. Some people don’t have options if they have to leave their house.
There's a big diff between I need a car and I need a car that makes the median reach 50k
Edit: average, for some reason I assumed editors aren't huge assholes
It seems like automakers would much rather sell fewer premium and luxury units at higher margins than sell more units of affordable cars at lower margins. I suppose I understand why, but it does leave a large consumer segment unserved. That seems like a good opportunity for a competitor to come in and serve the unserved market, but none of the big legacy car brands seem interested and new car companies don't have access to the capital it would take to build the manufacturing capacity necessary to mass produce affordable vehicles.
Sounds like a great opportunity for foreign car companies, from, say, China, for instance, to come in and serve that under served lower end of the market. But then, tariffs.
10ish years ago it was a conscious choice they made, the automakers.
Now?
They are trapped, they can only continue to exist if they have the margins from luxury car prices for basically standard cars.
The other thing that goes along with this is... horrendously shoddy construction and design, they're literally built to break down, intentionally.
They're not really automakers.
They're managers of very troubled tranches of debt obligations who happen to be in charge of auto plants.
We should have let them all die back in 09, but instead we bailed them out and their management became a punch of sycophantic 'dont rock the boat, we're experts' accountants, just like what happened Boeing after McDonnel Douglass bought them out, ousted their middle and upper managers, and wore the Boeing brand name like a skin suit.
They are completely incompetent, but even if they weren't, nobody could solve the mess they are in now after decades of coddling and kickbacks from the government, collusion with regulators... rotted them from the inside out, smothered themselves, not really caring because C suite gets golden parachutes no matter what happens.
Your last sentence underscores one of my main frustrations with this system of corporate enshittification. No matter what happens, there is no such thing as real life consequences for the c suite. They do as they please and retire comfortably without a care in the world.
And the inescapable logic there means that unless people put their own credible threat of violence on the table, nothing will continue to ever change.
You don't play a rigged poker game, you play the uh, meta-game, around and above it, otherwise, you always lose.
Capitalism does violence via complex bureaucracy, via obscuring and normalizing the system itself, by making it very complicated to try to draw some kind of moral line as to where responsibility for the acts of which actors in a system should lie.
The reality is that the system itself is violence, and that you are guilty to the degree that you partake in and profit from it.
This is why Luigi Mangione is pretty much seen as the modern day Robin Hood.
Capitalism serves capital, not the needs of the people. And the free market of competition is just a convenient myth with which to distract people.
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I say this with all my heart. /c/fuckcars.
"It's because of those EVs" says man driving $70,000 pickup as his daily driver
A new RWD base Model 3 is 36,990
It's really because of tariffs.
China has EVs with 300km range that only cost $15,000. Can't buy them in the US, though.
Gotta give the Musks your money, instead.
Hyundai's EVs are so much better than tesla's
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Yeah that was my first thought. How much is this influenced by 7 or 8 year loans on $70,000 trucks?
While that is clearlya problem behavior, has it really changed? The same people willing to put that much down on a luxury truck with a loan they can’t afford, would have done the same last year
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Inflation: how does it work?
Not only that, there's just so many huge vehicles full of tech. Not enough people want basic simple transportation anymore, or at least there aren't enough models to choose from.
Isn’t BYD a fraction of this cost, but we’re propping up stakeholder bonuses in Detroit?
This is such a tired argument. Literally the only remaining US automakers are GM, Ford, and Tesla. A vast majority of car sales in the US are foreign brands not domestic. BYD is being propped up just the same as what you're claiming here, which is why no other automaker in the world outside of China is able to beat these Chinese prices, so how is this alternative better for anyone?
China is doing this in order to dominate the market wherever they're allowed to enter, and are well equipped to undercut those local markets for as long as it takes to put everyone else out of business. They control a majority of the minerals needed for EVs so they get to set the external and internal price. They have lax safety and environmental regulations. They already control much of the world's manufacturing capacity. They're a massive country with a massive workforce.
Allowing them to dominate the world auto market in order to buy one or two cheap new cars (before prices shoot back up because monopoly) is going to be bad for everyone.
Picking up our bat and ball and stomping off home is a worse alternative. At school next week everyone will be talking about the great game that we completely missed from our own stubborn pride.
Allowing Chinese companies to dominate the world auto market so our legacy manufacturers can eke a few more years profit from obsolete technology isn’t going to help anyone. After those couple years, our legacy companies will be that much farther behind, unable to compete in a market dominated by those who were not afraid to compete
Its not "picking up our bat and ball and stomping off," it's recognizing that this new "team" is full of ringers who take no issue with cheating to win, who will pay referees to give them favorable calls, and who will only put on a good show for the crowd for as long as it takes to secure 1st place. This team also happens to control the supply of bats and balls and ensures that they get the best of the best at no cost while other teams are getting second rate bats and balls at sky-high prices. Those people talking about "how great the game was" don't see or understand any of this, so their opinions should be disregarded. They didn't witness a real competition, they witnessed something akin to a Harlem Globe Trotters or a WWE match.
You're still framing this as if it's about protecting our companies, but this is protecting our market, our jobs, and our agency as a nation. US companies only make up a small part of all this.
Furthermore, if you look at the situation in China with EVs, they have entire graveyards of practically new EVs rotting away because they're turning the automotive market into yet another segment of cheap, disposable products, which is not only terrible for consumers but also for the environment.
Are you really that desperate to buy a brand new car every year like its the latest iPhone that you'd upend the entire world market and put millions and millions of people out of work not just in the US but in the rest of Asia, Europe, Canada, and Mexico? Do you really think they'll continue the massive subsidies driving their prices so low once all the competition is gone? To get a little conspiratorial, with the design of modern EVs being entirely software controlled with wireless links back to the "mothership", are you willing to hand over control of the nations' entire fleet of vehicles to a single government entity that has demonstrated time and time again that they're willing to use whatever force necessary to maintain complete control and keep everyone in line?
No i think china decided to invest in manufacturing of future cars. They planned years ahead, developing rare earths and batteries. Then they encouraged new vehicle manufacturing, supported them, pushed them, invested in them, things that all countries do to build a priority industry. Sure there’s some inefficiencies, they wasted some of their money. But they dominate rare earths, dominate batteries, and are on their way to dominate EV manufacturing.
I’m all for some amount of protectionism, some amount of investment, planning on related technologies. We need to fight on equal ground. US economy took huge profits, huge pay, huge benefits from legacy car manufacturing and its important to support that 8n future manufacturing, to try to keep reaping the benefits.
But after doing a lot of research on batteries, we failed to develop manufacturing. After finding huge rare earths resources, we failed to develop those. We finally seemed to get our act together with incentives to develop new technology vehicles, to establish a large and growing market, to develop related technologies here, and to push legacy manufacturers to make the transition, and just threw it all away. It’s great for shareholders that legacy manufacturers will make sizeable profits on obsolete technology for a couple more years, but this is yet another case of throwing away any advantage we had, of pushing manufacturing more offshore.
Yes, I’m afraid that in a couple years when legacy manufacturers decide to get serious about new technology vehicles, they will be too far behind to succeed. They will be buggy whip manufacturers unable to build viable products for the automobile age, unable to compete where there will be a new set of established dominant manufacturers. China is not to blame for our failure, we are
Respectfully, protectionism isn’t that much better. In terms of economic velocity (efficient use of money/value/resources), it would be better if we used the money in other industries.
- “The Chinese are competitive.” Yup, they are beating the global
- ”They own the materials.” Yup, good planning on their part
- ”They have lax safety.” Nope.
- ”Massive country & workforce.” And a bunch of Chinese manufacturing has reduced humans and/or are dark with no humans.
“Allowing them to sell superior products is bad.” Sure, for the stakeholders. Not for Americans. I’m already being screwed by capitalists all over the place. Let’s expedite capitalism’s demise, please.
I think they mean lax labor safety. It’s much cheaper to make things if you don’t worry about your workers getting killed or injured at higher rates.
I'm not sure how you can call for the demise of capitalism while defending the worst parts of it here. This "economic velocity" is only good for the capitalists and what China is doing can only be described as capitalism.
The automotive industry employs millions of workers in the US at both domestic and foreign companies, and decimating that industry only to concentrate and centralize it somewhere else in the world is going to put those people out of work as well as creating a domino effect on the economy where all those dollars disappear from circulation. Capitalists will survive that but those workers won't, nor will the places where those workers spend their money currently.
What you're arguing for is essentially an entity like Walmart (China) moving into town and killing all its competitors by making it impossible to compete with them. We can see exactly how that scenario plays out in thousands of cities and towns across the US. Those "low prices" come at a steep cost for everyone involved except the capitalists running the business.
I have no issue with China selling cars here, but I do take issue with them rigging the game in their favor at our expense, which is why I support protection for the entire industry not just for US companies alone.
They own the materials.” Yup, good planning on their part
To expand on this: while yes they have great natural resources here, the more important part is they developed those resources. This is just another consequence of poor planning from everyone else: it’s too expensive, let’s let China do it. There’s another ten years behind due to our own short sightedness
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And American car/vehicle manufacturers are crying over low sales.
Stupid
Crying over fewer high margin sales. They want the same number of sales but with more profit.
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Adjusted for inflation, or better yet something like median salary, would probably be more meaningful.
Seems this will preferentially screw folks in low cost of living areas. If you're in a HCOL/VHCOL area and making ends meet, then a new car is probably affordable. If you're making ends meet in a LCOL area, then this is likely a huge expense.
Cars have also gotten much bigger, generally speaking more reliable, and stuffed with extra technology, some of which makes the car safer than before. Little of that technology is really optional now in the EU but still adds to the price.
A cirrent polo is the same size as a mark two golf, a three series is same size as an old face series. Most could downsize and not notice.
New cars are purchased on the monthly cost than anything else where I am, with a balloon for the final payment. Manufacturers make money again on the same car at the second sale but can only do so if they protect the resale price, which means ever increasing sales prices.
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