alt Hacker News>Because it is not at all obvious that that is, in fact, reality. It doesn't help to complain about easily-disprovable things like the affordability of cars.
Well you can just search "why are cars so expensive" and then you will find dozens of articles like the one below. I'm not American but I have the impression that cars were a kind of milestone in the life of young people in the past and this disappeared due to affordability. How much does it cost to live in a van nowadays? Can a part time fast food worker afford it?
I don't like this hedonistic argument that you used, it sounds like cheating, you risk sounding like the GP saying that houses today that nobody can afford are in fact cheaper because they are less likely to catch fire.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/autos/buying/why-owning-a-car-is-g...
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The American media writes articles about what gets clicks not what is true.
If you don't believe the enormous amount of freely available data on the internet. I am American, I had grandparents who were American. Poverty was a whole different beast in the 1930's compared to today.
If you compare similar widely sold cars across decades prices are fairly level in constant dollars in the US, at least in the low to maybe mid range. For example when I was buying a new car a little under a year ago I looked at 2025 models of some of my earlier cars.
A 2025 Nissan Sentra was pretty similar in constant dollars to my 1982 Datsun Sentra. A 2025 Honda Civic was pretty close to my 1989 Civic. A 2025 Honda CR-V was pretty close to my 2006 CR-V.
The average new car price now is quite a bit higher in constant dollars than the average new car price decades ago, but that is because preferences have shifted to cars that are at more expensive places in the lineup.
My 2006 CR-V for example was more than my 1989 Civic in constant dollars, but CR-Vs are at a higher price point that Civics. If I had gotten another Civic in 2006 it would have been about the same as my 1989 Civic.