The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

I can't believe that the average price of a car in the U.S. is almost $50k. For rapidly depreciating assets.

Here I am working out TCO costs for a range of mid-sized cars for my next purchase, and trying to decide if the extra $2k for a Prius Prime over a Prius will beat the differential in fuel costs for my driving situation. I feel like a chump, but I know it's the smarter thing to do with my money.

I coworker of mine just spent $100k on a regular old pickup truck that is planned to spend less than 5% of the time doing anything other than commuting him back and forth to work. It doesn't fit in any of the parking garages around here, or in his garage -- he has to park it at the other side of a surface lot because it doesn't fit in the normal spots. It gets like 11 mpg and uses the 92 octane fuel.

Americans won't buy cheap cars, they won't buy upmarket small cars, but they'll burn their children's college fund into the ground for a 2 second gain on 0-60 and bad ergonomics.

I can afford the fancy car, but I'd rather turn $100k into $200k in my index funds and buy an entire apartment in Spain overlooking the Mediterranean with the gains.

We can have nice things, but this is why we can't have affordable things.

A $100k pickup isn't a regular pickup, anymore than an $80k sedan is a regular sedan. It's gotta be more expensive than 95% of the pickups on the road. If it gets 11 mpg it must have a really beefy engine and be geared for towing. If it uses premium fuel, it's one of the badged models likely.

One thing that's odd about the pickup market is it isn't segmented into low tier/mid tier/luxury tier the way other vehicles are. The luxury version of a Toyota is a Lexus. The luxury version of an F-150 is still an F-150, just a different badge level. Your friend's is a luxury pickup.

If what you do 5% of the time absolutely requires a truck, you don't have many options. You can't rent a truck to tow easily and affordably. There are commercial truck rental places that do have vehicles you can tow with but if you're doing that even 2 days a month you might as well just buy the damn pickup.

And I'd focus on median prices a lot more than mean, though I'm sure there's an increase in that too.

Also, we drive a lot more miles than almost anyone, our gasoline is cheaper, our incomes are higher, and our cars last very long times and are safer than ever now. The average car is over a decade old now. When I was a kid, you got lucky if your odometer hit six figures, in fact some didn't even have that many digits! And I'm not that old.

The American car market is perhaps the best example of an efficient, highly competitive, well-regulated marketplace. Whatever the average price is, it's what it should be.

how is it efficient when there's regulation that prevents manufacturers from directly selling, and have to go through dealers?