The $25k car is going extinct?

You can still buy a new subcompact car (like a Renault Clio or Skoda Fabia) in Europe for under 20k EUR.

The more interesting question is why these cars disappeared in the US. And while many of the factors discussed here are true for both EU and US (inflation, interest rates, manufacturer profit margins etc) I am surprised no one mentioned the 'SUV loophole' of US regulations that effectively boosted the SUVs (off-road vehicles are classified as non-passenger automobiles with everything that entails, notably much less stringent emission standards) and made the small cars unprofitable to make in comparison.

Isn’t your argument basically saying that people choose to buy larger cars when the government doesn’t step in and penalize people for doing so? European regulators basically just forcing people to buy smaller cars is what that sounds like.

Also Europeans make less money, pay more taxes, and have less access to credit, so they can’t afford more expensive cars like many Americans. Hence the market catering more to people less willing to spend a lot of money on a car.

The poorest American state, Mississippi, is richer per-capita than most European countries, including France.

> Also Europeans make less money, pay more taxes, and have less access to credit, so they can’t afford more expensive cars like many Americans

Funnily your last point invalidates your first. Most Americans are loaded on debt, which impacts how much actual money they have left over at the end of the month. How many Americans can't stomach a $1000 surprise bill again?

> Isn’t your argument basically saying that people choose to buy larger cars when the government doesn’t step in and penalize people for doing so? European regulators basically just forcing people to buy smaller cars is what that sounds like.

No, you're looking at this the wrong way. US regulators make bigger cars more lucrative for manufacturers, so they only do that. EU regulators mostly focus on safety and emissions, which also slightly favours bigger cars (whose bigger price absorbs the safety features better), but not nearly to the same extent. Two of the biggest EU car groups (Stellanti and Renault) both are publicly asking to reduce some of the burden for smaller cars to be able to make cheaper small cars. On the other hand, US manufacturers (even Stellantis' Jeep, Dodge, Ram) don't mind just churning oversized monstrosities.

> The poorest American state, Mississippi, is richer per-capita than most European countries, including France.

GDP per capita doesn't mean what you think it does. Everything being overpriced in the US, and everything needing to have a middleman inflates GDP figures. Take health insurance, Americans pay multiple times what Europeans pay, to stuff the pockets of multiple for profit institutions and middlemen. GDP figures look better in the US, but really, which way is more efficient? Health outcomes are better across the EU, and the amount of medical bankruptcies is also telling.

> GDP per capita doesn't mean what you think it does. Everything being overpriced in the US, and everything needing to have a middleman inflates GDP figures. Take health insurance, Americans pay multiple times what Europeans pay, to stuff the pockets of multiple for profit institutions and middlemen. GDP figures look better in the US, but really, which way is more efficient? Health outcomes are better across the EU, and the amount of medical bankruptcies is also telling.

Healthcare is a particularly _atypical_ example to choose, and the particularly poor health outcomes of MS are only partly explicable by healthcare cost/access: it's also cultural and lifestyle issues. So it's rather disingenuous to say "take health insurance", as though it can be used by analogy to comprehensively explain other aspects of American finance.

You don't need recourse to GDP, you can just look at household income which really is higher. Most things do _not_ actually have inflated prices relative to European countries.

Would I rather live in Mississippi than France? Are Mississipians living better lives than French people? I mean it depends on where specifically, but almost certainly no. Of course having more money doesn't necessarily make a place better to live in.

But that doesn't invalidate "people have more money available to spend on cars and easier access to credit to finance that purchase over five years at favorable interest rates" as part of the reason why Americans choose to spend more money on cars.

You really don't have to take every point of discussion of difference between the US and European countries as an obligation to rant about how much better Europe is on tangential topics.

> You don't need recourse to GDP, you can just look at household income which really is higher.

Income would include the money being immediately spent to cover debt (be it student loans, mortgage, medical, car).

> Most things do _not_ actually have inflated prices relative to European countries

I'm struggling to think of things which aren't inflated. Only one I can come up with is gas/petrol/fuel, because there are much less taxes on it. Everything else I can think of is more expensive in the US - healthcare, transportation, food (groceries, and absurdly so for restaurants, for worse quality at that), various types of recreation (cinema, theatre, netflix and co, cable, watching live sports, concerts) internet, phone bills. Electricity is way too location dependent so I'll skip that one.

> But that doesn't invalidate "people have more money available to spend on cars and easier access to credit to finance that purchase over five years at favorable interest rates" as part of the reason why Americans choose to spend more money on cars.

Are interest rates favourable? There are multiple concerning trends (like car payments being one of the top household expenses and people struggling with that, people owing more on car loans than what the vehicle is worth, etc. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/10/15/american-consumers-are-incre... )

> You really don't have to take every point of discussion of difference between the US and European countries as an obligation to rant about how much better Europe is on tangential topics.

I'm not ranting, I'm correcting a wrong comparison using a wrong metric incorrectly. I don't know what is it with Americans reassuring themselves with GDP metrics, but it's very confusing why anyone would throw in GDP numbers when talking about disposable income and the car market.