People say this, and I wish they could get one if they want it, but the sales figures don’t back it up. People buying new cars weren’t buying the base trims with no frills. The XLT outsells the XL on the F150, the EX-L outsells the LX on the CR-V. Even the Versa, which used to be the cheapest car, they started making fewer S trims because people didn’t buy them.
That's because the cheapest trims are still way too fucking expensive. If I'm gonna pay $35k for a car, I might as well pay $39k to get the extra bits. But I only want to spend $20k on a car
Mitsubishi mirage MSRP was under $15k until 2023 and under $20k until they stopped making them in 2025.
Hyundai accent MSRP was under $15k till 2020 and under $17k till they stopped making them in 2022.
Hyundai venue MSRP is currently $20,550. Kia K4 $22,290
In very recent history cheap affordable cars existed, but sales numbers were abysmal bc people didn't actually want them despite actually being really good on gas and fairly reliable, the mirage had a combined mpg of 39 and the accent 36mpg combined, certainly not modern hybrid mpg but they weren't hybrids just cheap "small" cars.
But even today theres dozens of options under $30k let alone $35k
I feel like too many people are watching episodes of The Price is Right from the 80s and thinking a brand new tricked out car that cost $8-9k should be like $18k because they don't actually understand how severe inflation has been, especially over the past decade.
I gave actual MSRPs? Those are recent and the actual numbers....
And those aren't even that small or low powered. A 2 door commuter at 1500lb curb weight and 50hp could easily cost under $15k but people wouldn't buy it bc for some reason every car has got to be a big 4 door hatchback.
It's a cultural thing, we need to get back to being ok with small low power cars as commuters/grocery getters. If you need a big van/SUV bc you have a large family or you want a sports car or something then fine, but the obsession with commuter cars being massive is just silly.
Like I'd absolutely buy a 0.5L(500cc) 40hp engine ultra compact 2 door, no back seats, commuter car if they sold one, but no one does. Shit like that needs to exist.
Believe it or not I was agreeing with you. I specifically mentioned tricked out (read: premium options) cars and only one of your examples made it to 2026 by your own admission.
Edit:
Like I'd absolutely buy a 0.5L(500cc) 40hp engine ultra compact 2 door, no back seats, commuter car if they sold one, but no one does. Shit like that needs to exist.
Do Smart Cars not exist where you are? I know they're a Euro staple but they've been a thing in North America for a good 20+ years.
The slowest car available in the US was the mirage but they stopped selling it. It was 1.2L 78hp 3 cylinder 2100lb curb weight.
Now the slowest car on the market is a Nissan kicks with 10.4s 0-60 and 141hp 2L 4-cylinder but it's slow bc the 3,000+ lb curb weight and taller/larger profile. The lowest power car available is the Hyundai venue at 121hp 1.6L 4 cylinder 2700lb curb weight and 0-60 of 9.6s.
It's insane to me that these are the smallest/lowest power cars that are available at all here.
Uhhh is it really so hard to understand that a smaller engine is cheaper. And that a lighter smaller car can still be quick with a really low power engine since speed is directly proportional to weight and frontal area....
I want to know who's making a smart car with over 120hp other than EV smart cars. They don't exist. Or if they do they aren't cheap
Uhhh is it really so hard to understand that a smaller engine is cheaper.
Uhhh is it really so hard to understand that the US is larger than the entirety of the EU? Me driving 8 hours/500 miles one way across multiple states to attend an internet friend's wedding is nothing for an American.
I’ve never seen a smart car in the US, I saw them everywhere in Europe though. If you bought a smart car here everyone would make fun of you, even prius owners
I've seen plenty of Smart Cars in the states; mostly in the NY/NJ region in the mid 00s. I've still seen plenty in the Raleigh area over many of the past 20 years.
Its cause in America most people finance their cars so they rather buy a car thats 10k more but only ends up costing like $100 more per month for a better car, I work in a phone store and see people do the same thing everyday when buying the newest iPhone
Omg people are so bad with phones, I can't tell you how many people I know who are genuinely convinced their phone is free bc they get a new free one every 2 years or something with their plan.
Meanwhile they spend $60-100/mo/person and unlimited plans without the free phone bs are as cheap as $30/mo.
Like no your phone wasn't free you paid $40/mo extra every month for 2 years and traded in the old too. So after trade in it was $960.
Going on 3 years with my $400 Motorola thinkphone that performs in every way identical to a new flagship smartphone.
Your right, those free phone contracts is how those big phone companies trap you, whats funny is a 4 year old iphone basicly does 90% of what the new iphone does
Both the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla start at under $25k MSRP. Those are probably the best options for most. There's cheaper options from Hyundai, Kia, and Nissan also. As low as $22k MSRP. The venue, K4, kicks, Sentra, Elantra.
There's also even hybrids using Toyotas insanely reliable power split eCVT transmission, the Corolla hybrid at $25,175 and Prius at $28,755. The latter of which is a decent sized hatchback that gets 57mpg and this newest generation of Prius is actually quite powerful at 194hp so it's definitely not the slug the Prius is often considered.
Also Incase your not familiar with that eCVT from Toyota it is entirely different from belted cvts that literally everyone else uses. There's no belts anywhere and it chooses gear ratio by changing how two electric motors spin. It's one of the simplest, most reliable, and most efficient transmissions ever made
Wow, I'd actually never heard of an eCVT before..Ihave been car free for a couple years now but will probably be in the market next summer. Sounds more promising than I would've expected.
I highly recommend looking into a car with an eCVT. It's basically all the benefits of a cvt(no shifting meaning amazing efficiency and power) but it is actually simpler than a cvt, automatic, and even simpler than a manual.
Works by taking a planetary gear set and the gas engine spins the planet carrier, an electric motor(Toyota calls mg1) spins the sun gear, and a seperate electric motor(Toyota calls mg2) spins the ring gear which drives the driveshaft.
You change the speed at which mg1 spins to change the speed at which the engine spins in relation to the road speed/mg2 speed.
Also it allows you to entirely remove the alternator and starter since those jobs are done by either mg1 or mg2.
But this also means it's only possible to have a eCVT in a hybrid.
Toyota also licenses the tech out, the Ford Maverick hybrid for example uses Toyotas eCVT although it's a licensing agreement so Ford builds it.
Also all Toyota hybrids use eCVT including the Corolla hybrid for around $25k
The mirage is rough I had one as a rental. Great gas mileage. But it felt unsafe and like I was driving a go kart. If you have any real driving outside of a commute I would not use that thing.
We have 6 children. Three of them drive. We have two SUVs that are capable of 6 comfortably. But we need the trunk space many times for school sports and weekend getaways, so I’m looking at a larger vehicle.
For a car produced in the US thats not even gong to make the company money. You want something that doesnt exist.
Nissan dropped the only car that was under 20k MSRP in the US because they only sold between 15-20k of them a year. And it made them basically no profit.
The gently-used market is where you're shopping if thats your price point.
lol, I think this rational is so funny. People in modern day America believe they would have never been okay with slavery if they lived in the early 1800s, but they go ahead and buy products made from slave labor in 2026.
There's plenty that used to exist under 20k MSRP very recently. But people don't buy them bc they want big huge powerful cars.
Look at the mirage for example, it was always under $20k MSRP and sold up until last year. Or the accent. Or K4
And those aren't even small cars really. A 2 door commuter weighing sub 2000lb with 50-75hp would be insanely easy to turn a profit on at $20k, heck even $15k they'd be able to turn a profit.
But people literally refuse to buy those small low power cars while also crying that cars are too expensive.
Cheap low power small cars also tend to be quite reliable due to the lower power not stressing the trans or anything else as hard. And they are very good on gas.
And I'm not saying everyone should own a car like that. But if you have multiple cars at your household there's almost never a reason that you must have more than 1 large car. Have your crossover or SUV or van but then it's 100% on you if you think cars are all 35k+ bc you just ignore cheap compacts(which are still easy to find new $20k-$25k)
Not really. Toyota can sell new cars for $10k-$15k overseas. Those cars do not meet American crash or emissions regulations, but $5k-$7k more per unit should fix that easily
If that globalized car cannot be purchased because no one in that regional market can afford its sale price, then the manufacturer isn't saving money at all.
If consumers in Market A have shown through market studies and past experience that they will continue buying cars even if the price goes up, then the profit margins from selling at that higher price in Market A can help cover the losses taken from selling at a lower price that is affordable for Market B.
Nah just look at how budget cars used to be. Super low power, like 50-75hp, two door, so narrow you don't even get a third seat in the back at all, low to the ground, 15in or smaller wheels, etc.
The problem now is the obsession with everything having to be a big huge vehicle. Like the car you only use to commute to work and get groceries for some reason needs to be a 4 door hatchback.
99.9% of People won't even consider compact 2 doors anymore.
A company could easily make a 50hp, 1500lb, 2 door commuter, and produce it with zero slave labor while still making a good profit at $15,000 MSRP. But no one would buy it.
That’s exactly the point. The “bare bones” of a car are expensive; the “frills” are relatively cheap. I think much of the “I want no-frills cars again” movement comes from overestimating how much prices would come down. (And no, this isn’t driven by companies inflating the prices of base models; on the contrary margin tends to be higher on more expensive trims.)
You can get a brand new Venue for $20,000, a Trax for not much more. And that’s just MSRP. But that’s my point exactly. Most car buyers think the same thing you just described. “I might as well pay a little more and get the extra bits”
A car this cheap needs to be dead reliable, and do absolutely nothing else. Reliability is the only thing that matters in this price bracket, because for $20k I can get a lightly used Toyota Camry
Chevy Cruze scored between 80 and 87 its entire run so I really don’t trust jd power ratings. Hell even the sonic was like an 80 and that thing was hot dogshit especially the turbo models. Just look at the sonic subreddit and see how common it is for people to have 3-4 gallons of coolant in their car for how much that thing would over heat and eat coolant.
If you cannot trust scores then where amdo you get the idea the car is unreliable? How would one determine the overall reliability of a platform if you cannot use the very scores used to judge such a thing lmfao
Also the comment I replied to cited reliability ratings were poor when they aren't, so just because they're not the most reliable source of information doesn't mean the person who left this comment isn't just straight up lying lmfao
JD Power ratings are secondary to the market research they provide to their primary clients - car manufacturers. I’m sure it’s a completely reliable and not at all compromised score when they’re basically rating their customers products.
What are the User scores then?? Edmunds and Cars.com both give the Trax a good rating with its worst attribute being it's acceleration but nothing in terms of its reliability
JD power is well known to be a nonsense rating/award company.
They literally just twist the results or redo the "studies" until it gets what their clients pay them for. They get hired by companies for those ratings and awards, especially the awards which aren't given without paying them.
Me personally? The nearest Hyundai dealer from me has an SE Venue sitting on the lot, according to their site, yeah. But that probably varies by market.
This. I bought my first new car a couple months ago. (Been driving an old beat up 08 Ford Ranger for 8+ years.) Got a SE trimToyota Camry 2026 for 36k otd. The LE that is the base model was 3K cheaper. And honestly I didn't care too much about the extra bells and whistles. What made my decision was the color. SE was all blacked out and looked sleek af. The LE was white and I didn't want another white vehicle. Already spending over 30k, might as well add another 3k to the price and get the car that i think looks better and has some nice extra features.
That's because people with less money aren't buying new cars. Because new cars are unaffordable. If they were affordable, then more regular folks would be buying them and they would be buying the base models too.
And because of what dealers tend to stock on the lot. That was a problem with manual transmission trucks actually. The dealers point to a low percentage wanting them, but a low percentage wanting them was because they didn’t wanna wait. Two fucking months. many years ago I waited that two months. I got one of the best trucks ever built. they had to bring it in from out of state and there was a wasp nest in the fender well when they gave it to me, lol
When OPEC did their first oil embargo back in the 1970s, everybody wanted great gas mileage. Well, the only manufacturers making great gas mileage cars at the time were offshore, primarily Japan. Manufacturers ramped up production but nothing near enough to meet demand. You couldn't order a car, just had to shop from whatever came in.
Sooooo, in order to make more money off fewer cars, dealers gut-stuffed every import with every option they could.
And Detroit started making The Crappiest Cars Ever. They rusted away because thin metal is lighter. Aluminum engines. Electric windows became the norm because crank assemblies are heavier. Most car shows don't have many 1973 to around 1990 models. They were weak bodied and mechanically undependable. We drove late 60s early 70s GM models until the early 2000s. Dependable, gas was 99 cents a gallon, could pick 'em up for a couple hundred dollars. Junkyards were full of 'em, so parts were never a bother.
Naw the affordability is wrapped into the monthly payment, we have 96 month car loans as standard now, that's 8 years. If sales drop they'll adjust financing out to 120 months I guarentee we'll see that in the next year or two.
History is in the past. You're going by conditions pre-inflation, and more importantly pre cash-for-clunkers, which elimated the ~500 POS you could drive around for a year or five until it exploded or the wheels fell off, and drastically inflated the prices of actually-nice used vehicles.
Then you've got the fact that people just have less real buying power now than they have for most of that time, too.
I do not think that the assumptions you (and the American car industry) are operating under necessarily hold nowadays.
Why isn't Tata Motors falling over themselves to bring their cars to the US then, since you think they would sell so well?
Hint: because idiots just look at the monthly payment. Stretch the financing out far enough for a luxury tank to be the same monthly payment as a $10,000 Tata and they'll take the tank.
In the top 10 are Camry, Corollas, and Nissan Rogues (which baffles me). I'd bet Hyundai's are right behind too.
I think they sell fine. The problem is the profit margins are much higher for bigger and more expensive vehicles. Its kinda the same with homes. For houses it's much more expensive to build two houses on a half acre lot than it is to just build one big house and sell it for a lot more. I imagine the same thing applies to cars thus car makers are incentivized to do it - not the least of which is to comply with eco standards.
Lol what? That's literally because they stopped making affordable trims/models.
Look at the Mitsubishi mirage or Hyundai Accent for example. Both had decent sales numbers and MSRPs well under $20k.
Mitsubishi was selling around 20k-30k mirages every year. And the msrp wasn't over $15k until 2023. But that's the issue, they weren't making record braking profits off that low MSRP so they stopped making it.
Cars like that have very little margin so they have to be sold in large volumes to be worth it. People did not buy them in large volumes in the United States.
$20k for a Hyundai Venue. Adjusted for inflation that's comparable to past prices for cheap new cars. A lot better than older cars anyways, 100k miles used to be end of life. Now it's basically 200k miles.
You think these companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on market research and analysis just haven't thought about that? They don't make them because people don't buy them. People on a tight budget always choose a more loaded used car over a bare bones new car
There have been many start-up companies like Elio Motors that have tried to bring a low-cost, high-efficiency car to market. They can't get funding and numbers. There have also been various low-cost cars that have come to the US, like that little Smart Car; you barely see any. If there were enough people who wanted this, you would think at least one car company would make a smash-hit small cheap car to cater to that market.
It's also worth mentioning that lots of the electronics in cars can make the car cheaper overall; for instance, rear-view cameras and other anti-collision systems mean fewer accidents and cheaper insurance. A single accident can easily wipe out any savings you have in a cheaper car.
Yeah I'd rather lose money on my 5000 used car than a brand new 30,000 car.
Depreciation is still about 20% in the first year, and nearly 50% by year 5 of owning a new car. Also assuming most aren't buying outright and then your also paying interest on a loan.
So my used 5000 car might depreciate to 2000 in 2 years. That is still way better than going from 30,000 to 24,000 in 1 year and then to 15,000 in 5.
Ehhh those figures are including outliers, like luxury cars, that do tend to depreciate like rocks, which I why I added the qualifier "average" in my reply.
If depreciation is all you care about then yeah, go for a $5k used car but if you care about total cost of ownership, that probably isn't the best move.
If you're spending $5k on a car, it's probably because that's your absolute limit and not because it's the best financial move.
My 21 Honda Civic I bought new for $23k is worth $18k today 5 years later. I also bought a better trim that included adaptive cruise control and remote start since I needed that in Wisconsin winters
No it’s not. I bought my Honda civic SI and it’s worth exactly what it was 2 years ago. It’s a basic economy car with a sought after performance trim and a manual transmission. You just have to research what you are buying and actually know car culture.
AE86, s13 240sx, s14 240sx, 350z, 370z, fuck basically Toyotas entire lineup, 6th gen Honda civic si, 8th gen civic si, 9th gen civic si, all older generations of prelude and integra, Acura RSX, TSX, TL. This is just 3 brands so far…
Most people dont buy cars as an investment, so the value going down isnt the same as spending money on repairs. One is a number going down in some person's colored book and the other is money out of someone's pocket
Yeah everyone’s just acting like Americans aren’t consumeristic as fuck lmao. We want the bells and whistles, I’d rather buy an older car with all the features than a new car without any
People with “less” money aren’t buying new because they can’t get a loan due to D to I. If they could get a decent loan, they’d certainly buy new, but with a 8-10% rate… even those with money wouldn’t buy new. I’m at 1.6% on my 2025 SUV. My payments are just under $400/month. Many need to stop buying unnecessary things and saving up instead of ordering out all the time and taking vacations to expensive hotspots and going to overpriced events. I pay double my monthly payment and will have my new vehicle paid off within another 1 1/2 years easy. Then that’s extra money I can save toward my next new vehicle or to use to pay down my mortgage faster. Gotta have a plan!!
Woo hoo! Funny how car companies, with staff of marketers, cant figure this stuff out but regular redditors can. Oh, silly me, they already know it, and just don’t care.
I think its two problems. One, the people who dont want the bullshit are also going to be most likely to buy used. Two, the cheaper versions of these cars usually cut the most useful feaures first and then the most basic version of the car still has the shitty psuedo features I wanted to avoid in the first place.
100% this. Cheap cars are not being removed by manufacturers they're being driven out of the market by consumers.
Consumers are constantly buying the highest end packages dropping sales numbers on low end trims to the point that the manufacturers can't make them economically.
I’ve been saying this for years. I want a basic barebones car that doesn’t exist anymore in 2026 brand new, but that doesn’t mean most people want that and the sales figures back it up.
Idk, when I went to buy my car they literally did not have any without all the frills. I’d argue part of the issue though is they group them really dumb. I just wanted the safety perks. I wouldn’t call any of them frills. But they came with extra trim parts. I just told the dealer to put the extra parts in a box and I’d sell them
Yeah a lot of carmakers have started to even discontinue base trims, Toyota ended the LE Highlander this year for example, or like I said Nissan made fewer S trims on the versa before they killed the model completely. But in both cases it was because customers weren’t buying those trims at volume.
These are biased figures. What about all the people who didn’t buy any of them because the base trim is too much?
And also, the trims are always gamified so if you want to get AWD or captain’s chairs or something you always have to upgrade the trim and get a bunch of other random upgrades too.
Honest question, do people not want to buy base cars or do dealerships choose not to carry them? Last time I had to buy a car (pre covid to be honest) I tried to buy a base model and I couldn’t find one close by for sale. I was told dealerships made better margin on higher trim levels and when people turned them in to buy a new car, against, the dealership made more margin selling a used non-base model. I could’ve gotten a base model eventually but needed a car asap so now I have e a car with a bunch of features I don’t use.
I think it’s probably a little bit of both. People don’t buy the base trims so dealers stop carrying them. But I’m sure plenty do exactly what you said too.
They can get one if they want. Plenty of super reliable basic cars from the mid 2000’s on. It won’t be new, but if they really wanted it they could get it.
A big part of American culture is on living on debt and appearing richer than you really are. The general rule I recall was like 30% of what you earn on housing and at most 10% on transportation. There will be people paying like $700-1000 per month for new cars.
The moment some emergency happens they can no longer pay their bills on time and stay forever in debt for years because they keep making minimum payments and the 5 yr car loan goes out like 10 years.
I think it varies by market. Someone else in the comments asked me to find one and the nearest dealership has base trims on the lot. But I’m sure there’s loads of markets, higher median income areas, where it’s probably very very difficult.
When's the last time you went shopping for a new car? The only ones the dealer puts on the lot are the luxury packages because that's more profit for them. I tried really hard to buy a bare bones new cars a few years ago and it was a nightmare of bait and switches, "oh, but you'll only pay this much more for the next highest model, and that's all we have" after already getting a "guaranteed" price for the lower end one online. I eventually bought a used car from Shift which unfortunately went out of business.
I bought my current car in 2020 but I shopped for a very specific make, model, and trim. my argument is that the current situation is partially the result of those base trims not selling like higher ones. So they stopped carrying as many in response to market trends. But I don’t deny many dealerships purposefully don’t stock base trims for the reasons you described. A mix of both. I’m not saying it’s ONLY this or only that.
It's a self fulfilling prophecy, the dealers don't buy XL F150s because they don't make as much money on them so they aren't on lots as much as XLTs. I specifically asked last time I went to get a truck "I just want a basic work truck" and best they could do was a XLT "hybrid" that got worse milage than the 2022 I was turning in. If they aren't on the lots people won't buy them if they have to wait for them to be built.
I buy used so I can get a nicer car. I’m in it hours a week— give me my heated and cooling seats! And leather so it’s easy to clean. My car is my quiet time and my sanctuary. But I do drive it until the wheels fall off, and then get another gently used one. I also think used cars are the best way to avoid a lemon. The first few thousand miles will show the car’s unique… quirks, if any. Also let all the new material offgas or whatever first. I actually prefer used cars now
Edit: I’ve never owned a new car, so also maybe I don’t know, I should add
People say this and also usually can't figure out what inflation corrected means. Cars 15, 20, 30 years ago were generally as expensive or MORE expensive for FAR less car.
Its because they only include features that make the car more drivable at higher price points. I live in an area with BAD roads. 6 inches of ice in the winter, rutted and muddy in the summer. I wanted diff lockers and had to go for the top level trim to get them, which also involved an upgraded sound system, heated seats, remote start etc.
I would have been much, much happier with the base trim and lockers and so would my bank account
I was in this discussion yesterday, I wonder how much it’s a chicken-egg situation, does the higher trim sell because it’s what people want or because it’s what gets ordered/allocated to the dealer? I looked up Camry yesterday and like 22 out of 170 were base. Ok, so Lexus is a premium brand, but they still have a base in their catalogue, not one base rx350 in my search area.
It’s cold here and really the one option I really want is heated seats. I imagine that’s fairly common. But if you look around you’ll find that is only available on the top or maybe 2nd tier trims. And those are many thousands more. I guess other folks might have different requirements but I find it hard to imagine needing a Bose 11.9999 sound system.
And sure you can get some guy to put in aftermarket seat heating but kinda yuck.
I would agree, sadly. But if you're bad at making financial decisions - it speaks to a theory of mind that wants the frivolous shiny shiny and not the pragmatic.
The trims are like popcorn sizes at the movie theatre. LE trim at 30-35k and you your audio sounds like shit and the noise barrier is terrible on the highway.
They carefully design and put the biggest wants in the XLE trim and bundle with a bunch of crap you don’t need.
Exactly after the Great Recession, people were getting more basic with cars; they wanted efficient small cars. The second the economy improved, people hit the SUVs so hard they literally caused automakers like Ford to abandon their sedans.
I drive an 09 versa, the most stripped down version they sold that was automatic. My mother bought it for 9k. It has no power windows/locks, did not come with a radio, etc... The trunk can only be opened with the key. It does have Air Conditioning, but that broke around 10 years ago
That's not a valid logic train. If* you're already spending $40k, whats an extra $5k, especially when most ppl just look at the monthly payment, and going from base to loaded is only an extra $60-70. If you're payment is already $800/month, $870 isn't that big of a difference. If, however, you had a choice of buying a solid vehicle, without all these frills, at say, $20k-$25k, vs $40-$50k, I bet more consumers would make that cheaper choice.
Also, like others said, new car sales lately are heavily skewed to upper-middle to upper class income households. If lower-middle class isn't buying new cars, the data on buying base vs loaded trims is misleadingz
I mean those trims exists for an upsell though. How many people want leather seats but if you want that they usually make you buy at least the middle trim with a premium package that comes with all sorts of other shit? Like I can't get a sunroof on my Sante Fe unless I got the leather seat package which also came with bigger infotainment screen etc. and Hyundai is one of the better brands about this kind of thing. But car brands are notorious for this, American cars especially.
That's because humans, when given a choice of three options, will almost always default to the 2nd most expensive choice. They have a fear of loss and when comparing the three choices they observe the features they will "lose" with a different car and choose the happy medium. This isnt conscious
I literally have to fight with the fleet sales guy at my dealership to get an XL F150 work truck as an independent contractor. I’ve tried repeatedly. I have the cash and they don’t want to take it.
Unless you order 50, they don’t even want to take the order.
I have a maverick and I use it most days to haul drywall , 8 foot boards, ect ect ect.
The amount of people I see on pavement princess trucks - it’s ridiculous. These people don’t use the bed at all. They work in a cubicle . This is why trucks are so expensive - because people want a massive vehicle that has all the bells and whistles
It's because of how the trims are done. I didn't want the mid-line trim with a giant moon roof of the car I got, but the mid-level trim had the safety features that my GF and myself wanted. Why those were locked behind the upper level trim with even more shit added on, I have no idea. And it wasn't like we could have ordered the car specially, those features are always locked behind the upper level trims. Every car manufacturer does this.
I remember not even 10-15 years ago, some car companies would lock cruise control behind upper trims.
Yeah that’s pretty standard look at tech— the base phone will have less storage, 2 camera lenses, and might lack some other hardware features. If you want one of those, or a telephoto lens or whatever, you go up to a higher tier phone, even if it has other stuff on it you don’t plan to use. It’s all calculated for sure.
But most Americans aren’t buying sedans so why would one of those be the point of reference? The RAV4 and CR-V both outsold the Camry because more Americans buy SUVs, crossovers, and trucks. The XLE is the highest selling RAV4 trim, for example. So on the best selling crossover, the most popular kind of passenger vehicle in the US, most people don’t buy the base trim.
it was 8th in 2025 and the only sedan in the top 10. More people bought Model Ys than Camrys last year, which are like the epitome of what this tweet is talking about.
That list only provides sales data for the first quarter of this year. That’s a little incomplete, that’s why I quoted 2025 figures. But even if we look at those Q1 sales and see the different makes and models, my argument was if you check the best-selling trim levels they are not typically the base models. People say they want barebones models but they don’t buy them at the same volume as higher trims with more stuff. Carmakers know human psychology gets people to upgrade to the higher trim if they make the price increase feel tolerable.
Yeah everyone claiming they want the most basic shitbox to get from A to B better line up for a slate truck lol but even then I am confident the number 1 seller is not gonna be a totally baseline model with zero customizations. It’s a neat idea tho thank you for reminding me of it
I wanted to get the base trim of my current car the dealerships around me literally do not have base trim so the numbers are definitely gonna be skewed by dealers not carrying case trims
Some of the commenters here wonder if it’s a chicken and egg thing like which happened first— did they stop carrying the base models cuz nobody bought them? Or can nobody buy them cuz they stopped carrying them. I think it’s probably a little bit of both but mostly nobody was buying them. Nissan is just one example but before they discontinued the Versa they scrapped the S cuz nobody bought it and it was exactly like this tweet is describing
That’s because the XLT is only about $10k more. And usually there are options people want that’s only available on the XLT or higher.
What you are saying has some truth, but there is more to it than just people not wanting a base model. I know when my wife wanted a new SUV, there were a couple basic options she wanted and to get those options, we would have had to upgrade to more expensive trims with a bunch of options we didn’t want or need.
That's not true. The best selling ford is the maverick, its also the cheapest vehicle Ford sells. People absolutely do buy the crap out of inexpensive cars, but the profit margins are much better on the more expensive cars so manufacturers want to sell those instead.
I said that trim level of f150 sold better than the other. The f150 outsells the Maverick annually by 5-to-1 tho. Ford sold <200k Mavericks in 2025 and over 800k f150s the same year. Fleet sales are a factor more with the f150 but that doesn’t really change the fact the base trim of it still isn’t the most popular.
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u/freetotebag 9h ago
People say this, and I wish they could get one if they want it, but the sales figures don’t back it up. People buying new cars weren’t buying the base trims with no frills. The XLT outsells the XL on the F150, the EX-L outsells the LX on the CR-V. Even the Versa, which used to be the cheapest car, they started making fewer S trims because people didn’t buy them.