While not being a petrol head I was still living in a lala land where you could buy a brand new car for 10k EUR. Nothing fancy, just "a car". Obviously it turned out to be not true.
After some digging it turned out that in the last 10 years the price of cars went double. Literally double. Same car, like Fiat Panda, with the same engine and configuration, that ten years was worth one potato is now worth exactly two potato.
Long story short, the entry level car now costs close to 25k EUR. [1]
But here's the kicker.
While subvenstions seem to fail in most cases for regular people - like gvt giving people money to buy apartements equals to apartments being equally more expensive - it seems to work wonders for automotive thanks to Chinese.
EU offers up to 10k EUR subvention for electric cars and with that in mind you can get something like BYD Dolphin for slighly less than 20k EUR. Which is mind blowing. The car is comparable to Volvo XC40. Of course this is just an example and there is plentiful of other options.
[1] If you're not familiar or comfortable with EUR just think 1 EUR is 1 USD and you'll be fine.