this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
1014 points (98.4% liked)
Fuck Cars
16839 readers
1350 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
https://www.kbb.com/car-news/average-new-car-price-in-july-hits-2026-high/
This is enabled by financial illiteracy and arguably predatory 8+ year loans on new vehicles.
When I was car shopping last spring ( after totaling my 2013 mazda 3 😩) I saw that the most favorable financing seemed to be available for the larger and more expensive models. Like the Mazda 3 and CX 30 had no special incentives but the CX 5 and 90 had some zero 0 interest offers. I imagine that the financing incentives are similar at different credit levels, so there could be perverse incentive to spend more on a larger vehicle because it’s the only way to get a monthly payment that fits someone’s budget.
I also got a car semi recently and hearing how people are stretching the terms from 5 years to 8 (for lower payments) was shocking
Too many people buying above their means
What does that calculation look like when also considering used cars?
They’re also really expensive. When Covid shut down plants the price spiked and hasn’t recovered.
I don’t have any data on that though. My perception is that long loans give incentive to keep ised vehicle prices high - they’re almost interest-only payments for the first 1/3 of the loan so the owner of a 3 year old average car must sell it for almost MSRP or they’ll lose money, and unless there’s pressure to sell it at a loss, they won’t, in turn driving up used prices. Thats just my pet theory.
"Cash for Clunkers" had already fucked the used car market; Covid just added to it.
If you take a look at car YouTube and media this is something that been talked about since COVID.
Right now there is no value space for cars and if you're forced to purchase and can't pay cash interest rates are a thing too.
There are lots of models with 250 plus days of supply my concern is that the auto loan and AI bubbles pop at the same time, that would make '08 seem fun.