There is a fundamental truth you have to understand about car companies:They do not exist to make cars. They exist to make money. That distinction, analyst Kevin Tynan tells me, is why they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles.
Perhaps that’s an oversimplification. Tynan is the director of research at an auto-dealer-focused investment bank, the Presidio Group, with decades of experience as an analyst at firms like Bloomberg Intelligence. What he means isn’t that automakers have no interest in affordable products. It’s that their interest begins and ends with winning customers who will eventually buy more expensive, higher-margin products.
One of the auto industry’s dirtiest secrets is that at scale, it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits. In recent years especially, that’s a big part of why your new car choices have skewed so heavily toward bigger crossovers, SUVs and trucks.
Getting rid of the gas tax and switching to a mileage tax that factors in vehicle weight would help with this. If it costs you more every year to drive a bigger, heavier car, you’re going to want something smaller.
California is basically doing tax trials based on total mileage travelled per year, but not size.
My understanding from people I know in the CA Govt. legislature is that they have to tax based on what is known and one could easily have modifications on vehicles that would go unnoticed (truck lift kits, rice burners, hack jobs, etc). Mileage otoh is submitted during tax season already.
Very few, if any, modifications are going to dramatically change a vehicle’s curb weight. Of course, electrics weigh more than similar ICEs, so a better reason to skip a weight based tax is so as to not disincentivize electrics.
Edit: Also, what do you mean “rice burners”? Afaik, rice burner refers to any vehicle of Asian origin whether tuned or not. And trust me, tuning a car is not going to increase the curb weight by more than a few pounds.
As long as they do it by checking the odometer once a year and not with some kind of ridiculous privacy-destroying GPS-based scheme, I’m all for it.
(There are some dipshits who try to justify the latter by claiming they need to know where you drive to send the revenue to the right jurisdiction. Bullshit! They can just measure traffic volumes on each road segment – which they already do – and allocate proportional to that instead.)
Agreed you don’t need the mileage aspect just weight and VAT. However your insurance company app is likely already pulling GPS shenanigans and if your OnStar or whatever “roadside assistance” GPS box and cellular modem are enabled a lot more than just your location are being shared with anyone willing to pay for it.
Not on me, they aren’t. My newest vehicle is from the mid-2000s and none of them have tracking built in.
On a related note, I can’t own an EV electric car because nobody will sell me one that respects my privacy.
Edit: I do own several EVs: they’re bicycles, not cars. (They are my and my wife’s “daily drivers,” though.)
The problem with that is that EVs are heavier, meaning that smaller EVs would be taxed at the same level as SUVs or trucks. But it might at least incentivise people to go for smaller ICEs, and switching to mileage tax might be necessary anyway.
I up voted you because the weights aren’t that drastically different rn, but a Chevy Bolt is 3500lb while a larger civic with more cargo and passenger room is 3000.
Even if you don’t make them giant and obscenely inefficient, a 100kwh pack is gonna weigh over 300kg. Doesn’t matter if that gives it 1000 miles of range or 400 miles.
But isn’t it the weight that does more damage to the roads that the taxes are intended to pay for?
the weight does damage yes, but the lionshare of road damage is caused by shipping trucks because they are magnitudes heavier than a civilian vehicle while loaded. It’s the reason truck weigh stations exist
Do you think an electric car that weighs 1000lbs more than similar ICE cars is doing that much more damage to the road? And compare the damage cars, suvs, etc, would do versus box trucks, tractor-trailers, etc. There is no comparison to the damages between the two classes of vehicles. While true, an SUV will do more damage to the road than an econobox hatchback, even combined they don’t equal the damage a fully loaded tractor-trailer will do.
But that would disproportionately hit poor people. Generally they have to live farther out, where rents are cheaper, and in much of the US public transit is a pile of shit.
Hell, even in places where it isn’t it’s still painfully inconvenient. I live in a fairly transit-friendly city, and it takes my husband 45 minutes to an hour to get to work by transit, or 10-12 minutes by car.
How far is he from work? If your city has the right transit chops, an ebike might actually put both a car and transit to shame. Drives that take an hour by bus or 35 minutes by car take 26 minutes or less in my city, due to godawful traffic. But the bike lanes have no traffic lights and cut straight through massive areas, instead of block by block streetlights.
The problem is there are no easy safe bike paths directly there; he would have to either ride out of his way to one or travel part of the way on narrow fast roads that have a lot of box-truck and semi-truck traffic. Or get on the freeway for a stretch, which is also bad in different ways.
The bike paths that there are, are pretty nice, but they’re more geared towards ‘enjoy a ride along the river’ and less towards ‘get from the inner city out and back again quickly’.
But yes, when he is willing to take those risks, it’s about a half-hour or so to get to work.
I’ve noticed this a lot in industrial areas; no-one seems to think you’d want to ride a bike there, so they don’t bother with infrastructure. Unless it’s in the inner city, but in that case it’s more a thing of happenstance since there are bike paths already surrounding the area so it’s less work to add a few connecting paths.
I think you’re right, but I also think it’s insane that we think of 25000 dollar vehicles as the budget models. An affordable car is something a middle-class income could afford out of pocket in my opinion. Who can spare 25k nowadays?
Everyone and their mother is comfortable sitting on a car loan and $25k is pretty reasonable for a middle class family these days.
What still blows my mind is how common it is to I see people rolling around in $80k trucks.
In our stage of capitalism, these arent even exceptions. 16k for a Versa. Is probably the best deal I’ve seen in forever, because almost no one makes sub $20,000 cars now. The last New cars I saw for that were economy cars (Sonic/fiesta/fit etc)
Weird, Nissan doesn’t have a problem selling Versas for $16k? Chevy doesn’t have a problem selling a Malibu for $25k? Honda doesn’t have a problem selling a Civic for $25k or an Accord for 28k?
Malibu used to be sub $20,000 new. (2008) Civics were $13-15,000 in 2005 brand new. These prices are outrageous for the amount of car you get by comparison. $25000 for a civic? It’s small and goes vroom. For 3,000 more you have an Accord! Compared to an Accord Civics have no storage, small legroom, an engine that makes them zippy for sure, but it’s not as if the Accord is a slouch. At this stage mpg is comparable.
And what happens to the customers who literally can’t afford the expensive models? There’s a lost sale for every one of them.
If you’re not interested in playing the game of taking on massive debt Then that’s fine - in their eyes you can keep buying used cars. For this type of person, they’ve fought so hard to make every car so unfixable to the average person. Parts and service departments are free to make a killing if you can’t fix it yourself.
For those that insist on buying dates models you CAN fix - You can forever own hand me downs with ghosts under the hood, gremlins in the electrical lines and odometers with 6 digits. It’s just a numbers game where eventually you will buy one that shits out way sooner than you can afford before your mentality suggests “maybe reaching deep on a CC and getting something with warranties wouldn’t be so bad?”
“Improved”?
If you actually think that’s true, then I have a subscription to your seat belt to sell you.
This might be hard to believe but 2005 was nearly 20 years ago…cars have improved in nearly every way possible, then add 20 years of inflation to that and it starts to sound like a good deal…
Using an online inflation calculator shows the 2005 price inflating to 21,400, and the 2015 price inflating to 24,900. It would seem the civic is matching inflation. So, I’m wrong on how inflation has impacted the value of most cars, but that still doesn’t solve the problem that New cars aren’t being released for under $20,000 (stateside) anymore - and subsequently how much debt people have to sink into to buy New. Inflation has run what should just be a basic ass car into $24,000+
But my turnaround question would be does the cost to manufacture this car truly not fall? Is the manufacture cost also meeting inflation the way we found the MSRP has? Has manufacturing one truly remained at 90% MSRP? (A quick Google says profits are usually only 10%). If so, why? I understand facelifts and upgrades over the years but if you’ve been making the same “name” car that shares parts with itself through the years from 2005 till 2025, how are some of those parts not dirt ass cheap - because car brands are intentionally not reusing the parts. A great example is the 2012 and 2014 Chevy Sonic rims are the same. 2013 and 2015 are the same too. Why aren’t they they same across 4 years? Also why is the 2012 one a bolt pattern 5x105 - a size and pattern never used again or previously? Because fuck you, consumer, we needed them to be scarce so the price stays at $300 per rim. (Personal experience I had in 2017). A civic, and any other long life car model could be cheaper, but they’re not because car makers insist on convoluted systems and “innovation for innovation sake” so a new car is always full of new R&D they need to pay for.
Also cars are covered in touchscreens now. Do you know why - touchscreens are just a TV with a digitizer like your phone. And we have been making those for 20 years so they ARE cheap as dirt. Touchscreens are so popular in the face of consumers wanting buttons because they’re so cheap to put in and make a UI for. In fact the UI doesn’t even have to change, it just needs to look new every few years and anyone with some computer knowledge will tell you how far changing a jpg image for a button goes to fooling people you did a lot of work.
So they…don’t like profit? Because that also contradicts OP.
No, they made cars nearly unfixable to most mechanic shops and you, the consumer with computerisation/combining parts (climate controls are built into the radio unit on mustangs) and own the market on tools to fix their brand. Most Dealerships state parts/maintenance make big bucks. If your car is new enough Chevy and Dealerman are making bank by selling you, for example, a radio head unit that specifically fits around that climate control system, for $500 and then $70/hr in labor.
Not just the consumer, they also get to rake shops across the coals because they make parts that need a unique tool to access and then charge the shop $500 for the tool to prevent them getting their value out of its use. No shop will get $500 of use out of a cube tool that resets the brake caliper of a Kia Sedan in 2006, 2007, and 2008. So shops didn’t buy it. Where does that bring you but back to Kia Dealerships. (Or attempting it with needle nose pliers)
Your prices are way off. The only car that can be bought brand new for less than $20k in the USA is the Mitsubishi Mirage, and from experience it sucks to drive. A Malibu and a Civic are both like $29k, but actually Chevy just quit making Malibu’s this year.
Wouldn’t CAFE standards push them to smaller more efficient cars, or am I misunderstanding what CAFE standards are?
As for affordable cars, I think it’s fairly easy for the auto industry to just raise prices while extending financing terms longer and longer and advertise $299/mo (with 180 mo financing, $6k down, at 8% interest excluding taxes and fees).
I think what they’re saying is that CAFE standards just encourage companies to make and market vehicles where those standards don’t apply, or at least are less strict, such as “light trucks”
it doesn’t cost that much more to make a bigger, more expensive than a smaller and cheaper one. But they can charge you a lot more for the former, which makes this a game of profit margins and not just profits.
This is also why cars are loaded with electronics now. They’re high margin add-ons to inflate the value of the car with little cost.
Damn, I guess the nissan leaf needs a recall, it’s top cheap. How unfortunate that car manufacturers ignore a sizable chunk of their market
they’re not really interested in making affordable electric vehicles
Huh, that’s strange. I’m not really interested in a $25,000+ EV. Turns out that a $1,200 ebike is faster than my car (due to traffic) and costs orders of magnitude less to maintain and charge. I’ve basically just stopped driving.
Perhaps my interest will be piqued when they can develop a sub $25k EV, without half the “smart” features like subscriptions for Bluetooth audio and heated seats. Until then, I’ll use my old car like…a dozen times a year.
Yeah, it really fucking sucks when there’s only one form of transportation and virtually no alternatives. I’ve lived in places like that, and it’s always infuriating when your car won’t start and you are already running late for work. And the nearest bus is really slow and on a half-hour basis. My old city didn’t even have bus stops for awhile, you just had to flag the bus down and hope they saw you.
