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Comment by akavi | Hacker News Reader

"More than 80% of Americans have an individual income such that if they were the sole earner in their household AND chose to purchase the median cost new car, they would be spending more than a threshold chosen fairly arbitrarily by Market Watch" is the more accurate headline.

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> Things get a little better when you look at combined household incomes, with 34.4% of U.S. households making more than $100k each year.

That number is more reasonable; given that they're assuming 5-year loans, and the average car in the U.S. lasts 14 years. 5 years is close to 34% of 14 years.

This seems like a trueism, doesn't it? Isn't this just the pigeonhole principle?

How do journalists get it so wrong? It's got to be intentional, or neglectful to the point of "I'm not even trying to understand; just tell me what to print".

Never attributes to stupidity (or negligence) what can be obviously attributed to incentives.

I’m not even sure it’s median. It only ever says average, and my totally uneducated anecdotal guess is that it’s a mean. There could be a significant disparity between the two, as you can get a new car for $15 K or $18 million.

There are only three cars you can get in the US for less than $20k new, and at least two of them are objectively garbage - the Kia Rio and Mitsubishi Mirage. I don't know anything about the Nissan Versa but it can't be that great.

I don't say this to be pedantic but to point out that cars across the board are more expensive than most people realize, and if you haven't bought a new car in a while, especially post-COVID, it can be a shock to see that a car with terrible infotainment, a cheap plastic interior, and cloth seats will run you $30-35k new. You want nice speakers? Leather (even fake)? A steering wheel that isn't made out of Fisher Price plastic? Let me know if you find something for under $50k new. God forbid you want anything approaching luxury like ventilated seats or rear seat climate control unless you're willing to drop $1k/mo on something.

I think it would be mean, but I don't know if it there would be much skewing. The most expensive make they include is Tata at a $105,708[1] average transaction price. If you just average all the entries you get $54,000, so it looks like they're using average transaction price by make and number of vehicles sold by make to get the overall average price.

https://www.coxautoinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/March-...

Yup.

But what is a reasonable percentile for someone to "comfortably" afford the monthly payment for a median new car? Maybe 80 is on the high side. But it certainly isn't 50%.

10% of income as a heuristic for a car payment isn't too terrible.

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