The average transaction price for a new car now sits around $50,000.
I could ride a NYC subway or bus 16,666 times for that, assuming I never do more than 12 rides in a week to trip the “rest of the week is free” condition.
“Make cars cheaper” is a stupid solution that won’t scale well. Cars do tremendous damage to the environment and our society. But I expect everyone subscribed to “Fuck Cars” already knows that.
You can get a decent older, nothing fancy, riding horse for ~$3k and pay about $11k/yr for upkeep, significantly less if you’ve got space for them. Plus, ride the same route to and from the bar and they’ll memorize it- your own personal designated driver who like tips in apples!
$11k/yr for upkeep
That’s a lot. What’s included?
A horse mostly, they are expensive to keep around nowadays.
Yes, but what’s included for the horse? Food? Vet? Horseshoes? Grooming? Insurance? Apples? Do I still have to visit it daily or for $11/k there’s someone there taking care of him when I’m away?
Food, ferrier, routine healthcare, housing. Your biggest cost is housing, and the cost of that varies wildly by how fancy you want to get with it. I went with the low-mid end of decent amenities, similar to dog boarding. The horse has protection from elements, a bit of human interaction, space to be outside. I did not include insurance. However, ime, horse vets can be drastically less expensive than small animal vets for similar procedures. I have always gotten the impression this is because dog/cat healthcare is a much bigger industry and like human healthcare it jacks up the price because it can. I also didn’t include tack, but that’s also one of those things where the cost is dependent on how fancy one wants to get with it.
That does sound pretty cheap. In southern Spain I see people horse riding all the time. I live very close to a big city and I still pass people on horses on public roads from time to time. I think the biggest issue would be carrying my groceries. I would probably need a donkey too.
I have always gotten the impression this is because dog/cat healthcare is a much bigger industry and like human healthcare it jacks up the price because it can.
I learned from Rick & Morty that it’s because horses have bigger organs so less qualified surgeons can operate on them.
Western US here. I’m in an urban area where a lot of the farmland that turned into housing in the mid-1900s didn’t become modern subdivisions, so we still have sections of the city where people have enough land to keep their own horse, plus stables on the outskirts. Haven’t seen a horse in downtown in a while, but still see them on side roads, on the walking path along the river, and a lot in the hiking trails that run north of the city, which are basically an extension of the town at this point. When I was a kid in the 80s/90s there was a bar in the farm town about 6mi outside the city that had a hitching post out front and the cowboys still rode there to drink.
In some places you can still get a dui on a horse
Technically one could in my state, but there was a case (granted, 20+ yrs ago) where an old timer got it tossed out because despite being drunk af, he wasn’t on the road but off on the shoulder and there were enough witnesses and history to testify the horse consistently took him home without posing a danger to road safety. A lot of factors went in to that win, old timer, small town, everybody knew him, judge didn’t see him as an issue, so I wouldn’t suggest it for everybody in every situation.
That shoulder point seems like a moot point IMO. If I’m drunk in my car, i still can’t drive on the shoulder. It is also common for people on off road vehicles like atvs and snow mobiles to get DUIs. This 100% sounds like a small town grace thing.
I would guess the case could be made that any motorized vehicle doesn’t operate without a human actively making the choices about what the vehicle does, whereas a horse can take direction but will still “operate” even if the rider is blackout drunk. If you’re not on the road and not “operating” the horse, I think you could attempt to argue down to public intoxication or some other nuisance charge, especially if the horse was out of traffic and could be shown to reliably get you home without causing a disturbance. I’ll be interested to see how the courts deal with DUIs when a self-driving car is involved.
“inexpensive car” is a myth that keep getting repeated. Car can seems cheap up front but it could inflate in cost in the long run due to fuel and maintenance. Not to mention it’s a deprecating asset, doing serious damage to the environment in the long run, dangerous machine that often misused.
“but my fuel is cheap!”
Yeah? Because it’s subsidised, using your tax that’s better used for something else.
You are talking about total cost of ownership.
Car can seems cheap up front
Not anymore, which is the point of this article.
“but my fuel is cheap!”
Don’t forget the “but muh freedom!”. Let them now enjoy their freedom to stay at home since there’s not even sidewalks :-|
I think realistically this is the only way public transport will start to be forced past the car companies that lobby against it. Once the actual labour starts getting hit and affected, they’ll have no choice.
“Now”??
“Back then the amount remained the same” > “Now the amount is growing”. But i get your point and agree cars were always expensive.
It makes sense if you define car ownership in ~2024 as “affordable”
In 1979, when my parents bought a new Dodge Aspen wagon, its price of $5,000 was around the median car price, at about ⅓ of the median annual wage. That’s about $22,000 in 2026 dollars, which is about ⅓ of the median annual wage now. But the median car price is up to $50,000.
That’s about $22,000 in 2026 dollars,
If you believe the inflation numbers…
Well, yeah, inflation numbers are definitionally arbitrary even if you trust the math, since they depend so much on the judgement of the people compiling the data. The important point here is that the cost of a new car has gone up to a whole year’s pay, or more, for a lot of people.
Presumeably the article author has been insulated and didn’t realize that other people outside of their tax bracket exist.
I hear “the white imperial core” thrown around a lot.
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NYTrash is the worst imperial garbage.
Car dependency has always been an unsustainable grift benefiting the most privileged at the cost of the planetary destruction.
Don’t expect these liars to have a clue about this.
A reminder that since it’s original establishment, through multiple changes of ownership, the mission of the NYTimes has always been to advocate for liberal centrism against any and all alternatives. Despite momentarily appearances to the contrary, NYTimes has never been and will never be a ‘progressive’ paper.
This country only works if gas is cheap…and it’s already too late for that. Oopsie daisy I guess.
Or electricity, if we weren’t afraid of change. But even with some of the highest electricity prices in the country, I pay about half what i would for gas
I pay about half what i would for gas
For now… But ultimately EVs are unsustainable too. It’s just kicking the can while the planet burns.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of progress
Replacing ICE cars with EVs are a solid amount of progress, it’s progress within control of individuals, and it’s progress that can change society in a decade or two.
Transit and walkability would be better but I can’t do anything about that and significant progress would be a century or more.
Well well well if it isn’t the consequences of our own stupid actions
Car companies passed a bunch of laws prohibiting competition and alternatives and got trillions in subsidies. Now they’re welfare programs for the nations dumbest and most pampered CEOs.
The Happy Motoring Society was never sustainable
i’m so grateful to live in a city with decent public transit (seattle)
none of my social life adventures would be possible without it
highly recommend cities if you’re able to. they’re always so much nicer to live in than suburbs or rural shitholes
They also forgot to put heavy cause of pollution in that title
The whole car-centric lifestyle is unhealthy and unsustainable.
Maybe stop putting in huge electronic systems I don’t want
Honestly, there have only been a few improvements to vehicles since the year 1990 that I actually appreciate
Regardless of whether they are right or wrong, what a terrible article comparing all kinds of apples and oranges and jumping to conclusions.
Comparing apples and oranges is totally valid.
Oh, come on, you know what I mean. I am not complaining that the author compares different things on the same metric.
I am complaining that the author first tells a story about a worker who needs any reliable car to commute, then semi-complains about cars getting bigger and having more power, and then goes on to claim that a BYD (or was it another Chinese car?) has more HP than a Tesla, which I bet the worker from the story does not care about at all. That is sloppy at best, misleading at worst.
Or how they seem to compare base-model and “up to” prices. Yeah, if you tick all the boxes at the dealership, the car will be expensive, no shit.
Or how they list the average repair as $840, which they claim is more than many Americans can afford right now, without mentioning that maybe the average repair is skewed by some rich people doing repairs on their Ferrari, which might cost a bit more than changing the oil and replacing the clutch of the average worker’s beater car in Joe Smith’s No-Name Car Shop.
I am not even against the core observation or message of the article, cars suck in all but exceptional circumstances, and I want a society where most people don’t need and don’t have a car. But maaan.
At no point have cars ever been “inexpensive”, they’ve just been more or less obtainable. Big difference, a car has always been a very large purchase.
Althought this is true, it is also true the industry has shifted to models of cars with higher profit margins, mainly SUVs and light trucks, which follow a loophole claiming they aren’t “passenger vehicles”.
The CAFE fleet loophole, yeah. It’s less of a loophole at this point, more of an 8-lane interstate bypass. Cars have always been expensive items that not everyone can afford but you’re right, the margins between wages and car costs are wider today.
Not only that but its also what you get in a car these days. 50 years ago you had pretty much a drive train, seats, and radios. Now even base models come with touch screens, sensors, cameras, automatic doors etc. Some of which are nice features sure, but they still come at an additional cost.
cheap planet scorching cats
