That's not outrageous as a car price once you add insurance, maintenance, taxes, parking, license fee, cleaning, etc

Along with any interest on the purchase or foregone investment gains. You can use a true cost of ownership calculator here.

https://www.edmunds.com/honda/accord/2022/cost-to-own/?style...

The average monthly payment for a used car in the US in 2025 was $532, according to https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/average-car-paym.... This does not count insurance, taxes, parking, or gas.

A status symbol will easily run you $1000/mo. I currently pay $350/mo (including cost of capital), and I don't know how I would pay less for a car that's not actively falling apart. Chevy Spark, manual transmission, $7k KBB value, averaging 500 miles per month.

The standard tax deduction for car travel is $0.70 / mile in the US, which accounts for things like insurance, gas, maintenance, and depreciation. So $500 / month is around 700 miles, which probably around 90% of US drivers surpass.

> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.

This can vary a lot.

6 years ago, I was driving a Subaru BRZ which averaged 32 mpg. My commute was ~30 miles each way, add in a couple miles for weekly errands, and let's just say I was using 10 gallons/week. If gas was $3, that's $30/week, $120/month. Plus $150/month for insurance, it's $270/month.

Still way under your 350-500/month figure, but that's also assuming the car is paid off.

> If it does, it’s a status symbol, not merely a tool to get from A to B, and therefore it is unfair to compare it against taxi rides.

$350-500/month is cheaper than taxi rides. Even with a more reasonable 5-10 mile commute, I'd be spending probably $50/DAY if I took taxis.

> A car does not cost $350 and $500 per month.

Insurance alone can be 100€ a month (and more so for younger drivers). At a very modest 5 liters / 100km and a one way route of 20 km you're at 800km a month / 40 liters of gas => 1.80€ a liter => 72€ in fuel. Your average car then has 20 ct/km for maintenance costs (inspections, spare parts, oil changes, tires, workshop time), so another 160€ a month - and more if it is a run-down junker car.

That are just the fixed running costs you have with pretty much every car, around 330€ a month. We haven't talked about depreciation yet at all. Even if you say you buy a barely road worthy wreck for 3000 € and run it until it's only ripe for the junkyard to fetch maybe 500 € every two years, that's still about 100€ a month you're paying.

And what we also haven't had a single talk about is operating and purchase taxes, highway tolls, city-core tolls, rental spots for parking (including the price you have paid for the garage in your house, it's a lot of real estate), that also can easily add to many hundreds of euros each year.

Cars are expensive once you actually include replacement/depreciation and maintenance costs.

Car insurance has essentially doubled in price over the past few years, from a combination of

- cars becoming more complicated to repair. Marco Arment of Overcast related an incident where his Rivian had a simple fender bender, and his insurance was billed $15,000 in labor and parts to fix it because of the monobody construction where you have to tear apart half the car to fix anything

- inflation in both goods and services means car repair costs are going up

- more reckless and uninsured drivers thanks to general post-covid norm breakdowns

Insurance alone can now be $150-200/month even if you don't have a particularly nice car. Combine that with gas, maintenance, and registration taxes, and I think most people in the US are paying at least $350/month for their car even if amortized costs mean they don't realize it.

huh? i bought a used, very low-end/utilitarian 10 year old car and paid more than half upfront and my monthly payment was like $300. factor in insurance and gas and i was easily close to 400-450. the days of $1000 beaters that actually run well are gone :(