For the first time since the Big Three CEO went to Washington in 2008, hats in hand, to ask for a massive bailout, the top execs have been called back by Sen. Ted Cruz to answer questions about why cars cost so damn much.
It’s time for some answers. Things are terrible in the car market for anyone who can’t drop $40,000 on a vehicle, and repair costs are climbing through the roof.
How bad are things? There are no new cars on the market for under $20,000 anymore. The average person spends $1,000 a month on his vehicle, between the loan, insurance, gas, and repairs. And many folks looking for reliable vehicles are buying cars made before 2020.
There’s a reason people fantasize about cheap vehicles banned for import in America. Viral videos showcasing $5,700 Chinese sedans proliferate on social media. Toyota even makes a pickup truck for Asia that costs $13,200 brand-new. In America we should not be longing for products widely available in countries with the same GDP as Indiana. That screams “overregulation” or “protectionism” or something worse.
Some anecdotes.
Recently, a Warren-based mobile mechanic told me that he charges double to work on vehicles built after 2018. Why? Because cars are now giant computers, and all the parts are caged off unnecessarily under the hood. He said it once took him four hours and three men to break an internal cage and replace a starter.
Another: A woman I spoke with recently got pulled over for having a tail light out on a newer SUV. With her previous vehicle, she could have just pulled off to AutoZone, grabbed a bulb for a few bucks, popped it in and be done. Now, replacing such a simple and core part requires a whole assembly replacement and was going to cost her $500.
My own 2020 Ford Expedition needed a new transmission at 80,000 miles. I’ll concede that transmissions don’t last forever, but come on. The SUV looks like a spaceship inside, has dozens of bells and whistles that I’ll never use, but fell out of gear when I was driving uphill on my way to church with my kids in the car.
Consider where we began. Ford and the other early automakers had a good idea: make a machine that could get you from point A to point B without exploding. They managed that reasonably well for a long time, but then big automakers became banks, idiotic regulations turned cars into wimpy computers, and repairing them yourself became impossible for even the most capable layman to do.
Good for the rental and leasing market, bad for America.
There’s obviously something amiss. Friends tell me more or less constantly that they are in the market for F-150s from the 1990s because the engines they produced back then were more or less indestructible. Those trucks regularly eclipse 800,000 miles. The best part? You can replace basic parts on them yourself. No $500 tail lights on one of these bad boys.
Many others look at the sorry state of the gas-powered market and opt for an electric vehicle. They assume (probably rightly) that fewer components means less maintenance. People would rather buzz about sitting on top of a giant battery worrying whether they have the juice to get home than deal with the perils and headaches of a legacy dealer. Things are so bad that people would rather risk a massive battery fire in the case of a crash and face low resale value than buy a normal new gas-powered vehicle. Maybe that says it all.
If the desirable choices in the current car market are EVs that crap out in the cold or the same model years our parents drove when they were our age, we have a serious problem.
We need a solution here, and that might start with some tough questions from Congress.
Mark Naida is editor of Michigan Enjoyer.
