Nah, the cost of the electronics and lighting are very minimal; they are higher margin (like most luxury components), but an extremely stripped down model Hyundai Venue is the lowest priced new car you can buy, and it's about $20.5k right now, if you can find one that poorly equipped.
But if you look at the cost breakdown, of say a Chevy Trax, you get:
$21k - most stripped down (LS trim)
$25k - best equipped (2RS trim)
The difference between the basic trim and best trim is about 20% of the base-price. That's pretty consistent across the industry, between 18%-25% being the majority of gaps.
All new cars in the US must have parts available to the owner, and must be not prohibited from being repaired by any shop. It is illegal for them to prevent you from obtaining replacement parts or having a non-dealer approved shop doing repairs. So your entire premise is wrong.
The reasons cars are expensive is that raw materials are very expensive, and in the US, for US-assembled cars, healthcare is very expensive. Those are the two largest costs of a new car in the US today. The next are transportation of the components and final car, and labor.
Finally, no one should take the OPs premise too seriously. The US is the 1st or 2nd largest car market in the world, depending on how you count. There are 15-17 million new cars and trucks sold yearly, and that number is steady or growing, not declining. The average cost is not close to the lowest price, but rather, it's $49k in 2025. So despite some people complaining, there has yet to be demand destruction from high prices, meaning.. people are still buying new cars.
Yeah, weirdly cutting over to a universal healthcare system in the US would potentially create a price collapse for every labor intensive good or service to the extent it was labor intensive.
Yes, healthcare for employees and retires is a huge cost.
For example, for sells 2 million cars and light trucks in the US, and spends about $1.2B on healthcare for employees and retires, directly. So that's $600 of every cars purchase price is just to cover healthcare costs.
Fords entire net-income/free-cash flow is about $3.5B, so put it another way, Ford is spending 25% of it's entire profits on healthcare for it's employees.
Put another way, for example: Ford's total revenue is about $180B, say.
$170B is that COGS - cost of goods sold. That includes most expenses including labor, materials, transportation, taxes, tarrifs, etc.
$170B, about $100B of that is just raw materials
About $15B of that is direct payroll. That leaves about $55B for all other operations: debt-service, taxes, physical buildings, transportation, advertising, franchise operations, general admin, etc.
Healthcare is rising 3X the cost of everything else.
The craziest thing about this is despite healthcare increasing in cost so rapidly, healthcare quality and accessibility are decreasing. And this is one of the few instances where we really can pin all the blame on one thing: the insurance companies.
When people say they want Medicare For All, we generally don't mention benefits like this, but M4A would save Americans a LOT of money, assuming we also get good consumer protections with it and maybe a few decent anti-monopoly laws. The tax argument from the Republicans is about as false as arguments get.
Yeah, without a doubt, Americans are paying 2X more than anyone else in the world for healthcare.
The reason that the wealthy and upper income earners don't want to fix the system is because of incentives. There is scarcity, and they benefit from the market choice dynamics, without having to suffer any side effects: those are paid by poor people.
So at the poor end of buyer market for US healthcare people scrimp, save, coupon clip, and go without. And because of it: die younger, sicker, and less gracefully than poor people in other civilized countries.
At the end of the market, health insurance and private pay and high-end specialists cater their practice to the wealthy and upper-middle class, and get extremely rich doing so.
Fixing this would subject those upper middle, upper, and wealthy individuals to the facts that we don't have enough care to go around. And the one thing that we won't expect rich people in the US to do is hear "no" while they still have money to throw around.
No, the cost of delivering healthcare is irrespective of who pays for it. The employee from wages, the employer from revenue, a combination of both.
This is a problem with Americas economic competitiveness.
It's two problems.
First is that total spending per person in the US is.. $18k per year. Ford pays about $10k per person. McDonalds pays about $3k per person. The gap is paid for by the employees from wages, or by taxpayers. So one question is why does McD's only pay 1/3 of what Ford pays, and why do some other companies pay more (Google pays about $22k per employee, for example).
The second is that.. spending per person is $18k. This is 2X or 3X the amount of better countries. Japan pays $10k. Germany $9K. The UK about $8.5K. Canada spends $9K. These countries all have better outcomes and better health.
Canada in particular has basically mirror culture and demographic and health modalities.. but pays half. Because America is very poorly managed and run. And no employer can counteract that.
Since the GOP basically repealed the cost-control measures of the ACA, medical inflation is running 25-30% higher than general inflation rates. So a higher cost of everything is healthcare.
I’d be curious if the countries you mentioned have lower obesity/diabetes/heart disease rates than the US? Would that factor into healthcare costs? America seems to have a very unhealthy population compared to other developed countries, which I imagine would increase healthcare costs?
that's part of the better outcomes and better health part. it's a bit of a chicken/egg problem, where yes, being in poorer health to start is more expensive, but also because it's expensive, ppl delay their preventative healthcare and end up with bigger problems
Right - if you have $12k to spend on a car, lets say, you can't buy a new car, right now you are looking at a 8-10 year old used car to get a residual value in that range.
But how many of those new vehicles are bought by businesses or fleet operators like cabs, and government agencies like police departments? The average age of cars on the road is 12.5 years. Ford just announced that third quarter sales for 2026 is down from 2027. Loans now go out to seven years. So the OP’s complaint should be taken seriously.
The overall number of new cars and light trucks is growing slightly or flat - the average age of cars is increasing because they’re better built year over year.
Reddit and the internet is just not a representative slice of America. Americans for better or worse love to spend 12-20% of their income on private transportation.
It's okay - it's always a good for people to learn and hear contradictory information. Even if it's unpopular or not received well, it's good to just say whats true.
Nah. The minimum standard equipment keeps going up because that’s what new car buyers actually want. Long ago I worked at a dealership and the base trims with no optional equipment would sit for months and months.
Most of the people who claim to want basic transportation with no frills buy used cars.
this is so insightful but likely will get lost in these conspiracy theories that the whole global car industry is somehow colluding to intentionally add things no one wants so it breaks and you can pay them to fix it
so much simpler that the customers of new cars want to add the features, and most car manufactures don't have the expertise/staffing to make great electronic tech so you get wonky experiences after all the tradeoffs and constraints they worked through
Like you said, I want those extra features. I do want cameras around my car. The birds eye view rendering in some cars I’ve seen is awesome and looks super helpful. I also want a screen for GPS so I’m not buying another screen or using my small phone screen on a stand. I want the modern safety features and QoL features like lane assist and adaptive cruise. I don’t want required software updates, but I do want to be able to patch an issue with the electrical system the manufacturer identified a year after sale. I don’t want the most basic features on something I’ll be using almost daily for years.
They've been talking about some of the new Mercedes' on the mechanic subs, you cant even open the hood without taking it to the dealership and if you try to open it, it voids the warranty
It been on EV models for a while now (you apparently add washer fluid through a hidden filler cap by the fender, It been a while since Ive worked in a shop myself so I just have to hope they're not doing it on combustion engines as well, the ads on people's displays and the Ford patents seem strange as well.
Its illegal for someone to say "no you can't take it to the shop of your choice for repairs" it is very legal to make systems harder to work on or complex enough that you have to take it to a dealership if the mechanic of your choice didn't spend a few stacks on the proper equipment, thats where we are now.
But odds are you will see the repair cost and just buy another car instead. Of course this is hopefully 5 to 10 years down the road, so you won't hand the brand. You had a good run.
And now the used car market is just absolutely garbage.
That stuff will break, and it's so specialized that only they can repair it.
Its about two orders of magnitude less likely to break than physical buttons, which WILL wear out and short out because they are mechanical things that experience wear and tear.
Modern touchscreens fail far less often.
And on top of that, have you ever had to pay for a center console replacement with buttons? Its not cheap. The parts alone are often several hundred dollars.
No one is making money off those cheap electronic lol, and it's nowhere near "specialized. You can repair a touch screen for like $50, and those dashes off wrecked cars go on ebay for cheap all the time. No one is doing maintenance on their touch screens. The only additional maintenance you have to do these days is more frequent oil changes due to everyone running small high compression turbo engines to meet EPA requirements.
Sure, that would be true if we believe Trump’s lie that tariffs give American manufacturers an advantage.
US manufacturers obvi WOULD seize any advantage if they could. But, there is no advantage to be had. Their business has become more difficult, not improved. And, it’s not like all the Americans who want a cheap Chinese car are lining up to buy expensive new US cars because it’s all that’s available. No, many people are just not buying new cars at all. The only benefit is less competition, but it’s meaningless because it’s not like people are buying anyway.
I have an inbuilt navigation for my car, but the roads have all changed significantly over the years. I asked about updating the system, was told it would cost me over $1000 for it. I laughed and said fuck no.
There have been a ton of decent-to-good, very cheap, very simple cars offered for sale in the US market and no one buys them. Cars like the Fiesta, Yaris, and Versa get endlessly maligned for being bare bones, with mechanical climate controls and DIN radio slots, meanwhile literally everyone and their mother goes and buys CUVs that cost $40k+ and have every gimmick feature under the sun.
Same deal with so many things. Appliances, tech, even furniture. I think it's rather immoral to build crap like everyone is right now, but at the same time, I can't fault a company for building it when the public eats it the fuck up. If you want bare bones and reliable, buy bare bones and reliable - don't go and buy a Samsung SmartFridge
I'll never buy a new vehicle. Even if I had the money, I would choose to restore something from 2010 or earlier Toyota or Honda. They've got the important features without the gimmicks.
Interesting. I would’ve thought they made money by selling cars. This model works if you’re basically giving the car away and making money on the back end. But to sell the car at outrageous prices in the first place to then make more when the POS breaks is just greed.
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u/Impossible_Offer7988 9h ago edited 9h ago
You don't, but they do.
That stuff will break, and it's so specialized that only they can repair it.
That is how they make their money they can charge you more because the cars are so loaded.
The cars are now filled with stuff that requires more (expensive maintenance)
that's two cases of putting money in their pockets.
Dealers and banks also now earn more (the manufacturer gets a cut of that as well).
So this is never gonna change.