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What happened is there are no real "budget" cars anymore. Mandatory safety, engine, emission, backup cameras (yes, they're mandatory) has steadily driven the base price of a car so high that the added cost of creature comforts doesn't actually increase the price of a car that much relative to the total price. Why would someone spend spend $40k on a bare bones car when they could get a well-equipped car for $45k? That's basically where we're at. So, basically all cars, "budget" or luxury, need to have all the major creature comforts.

But why is that somebody spending even 40k on a barebone car?

How is it that BYD and a bunch of chinese manufacturers able to produce ~10k car but nobody else?

That same BYD is $30-40K in Australia. Governments subsidize. The US will subsidize around $7-10K of your US made EV. China does that too.

Tell us you haven't been in a contemporary Corolla without telling us you haven't been in a Corolla recently.

A corolla isn't a budget car.

The cheapest configurable Corolla here (Australia) is $35,857. More than 50% of the median yearly wage ($65000)

To me that's not a budget car. The closest thing would be a Kia Picanto for about $18500

I'm not really seeing why safety or emissions rules drive up the price of a car? Backup camera sure that's an extra $200.

Cars require hundreds to thousands of microchips these days. Airbags require sensors and circuits. Emission systems require expensive sensors, and engines require complex electronic and mechanical real-time tuning systems to constantly monitor and adjust fuel usage to limit emissions and meet minimum mpg requirements. Automatic transmissions are now extremely complex, including 8 to 10 gears or using CVT to achieve the best fuel efficiency. Backup cameras need a monitor, and it costs more than $200. And now that you must put a monitor in the car, you can't just have it be useless except for a backup camera, so now you have to add a bunch of software features. Meeting emissions requirements means making cars much lighter. This means more expensive composites and materials. This means increased manufacturing and engineering costs to meet structural requirements while designing cars with the least amount of material.

I don't think you realize how simple cars used to be. Engines were extremely simple and purely mechanical, essentially 50 year old technology. Transmissions were simpler, either manual transmissions or ATS with only a handful of gears. Engines and cars were made entirely of cheap steel. You had no expensive screens, no expensive sensors or electronics. You had no expensive research on structural design and materials science. You had no expensive emissions systems. You could fix nearly everything in the car with hand tools.

As far as airbags, my assumption was that you're going to have at least 2 no matter what, and I don't think more than 2 is mandatory.

The big differences to engine and transmission are interesting, I believe you that it's a big difference but I'm not sure how to evaluate specific numbers for it.

Building the entire car with more expensive structure and paneling sounds like a pretty bad thing to effectively require, especially when most losses are aerodynamic.

For backup cameras I was including the monitor in that price. You can buy kits for under $50, so I don't think $200 is unrealistic for something built in.

I will say that having a thousand microchips rather than a dozen is probably because it's cheaper that way.

I think it is just global manufacturing. Plus a little bit of feature parity.

It seems maybe tesla is the one fighting it. I think the original model S used steering wheel stalks from mercedes?

Now they do so many things themselves (or don't do in case of stalks), to the point of making their own chips for the machine learning stuff.

Re: Tesla - at least in the early days, they did the same thing a lot of boutique manufacturers did: https://www.theautopian.com/how-tesla-engineers-saved-millio...

Re: "global manufacturing" - yeah, but there's also a choice being made there. I own an older BMW, and there's been a very clear shift away from what was once a differentiated product to a kind of blah middle-object, which is almost certainly in pursuit of a larger market share, but again, that's a choice. I could tell you what the value prop of a BMW made between 1975 and 2005 was, I can't really tell you what it is now, and that's a choice it seems like a lot of manufacturers are making.

> value prop of a BMW made between 1975 and 2005

I'd be curious for someone to explain what this is, and what happened in 2005 that changed this.

For a very long time, BMW's cars were intentionally driver-centric - if you got a BMW, you were getting a car that was luxurious and well built, sure, but more than that, was just sublime to drive in a way the spec sheets don't capture. The handling, steering, suspension feel, engine and transmission, everything combined for something that was engaging and genuinely fun to drive, but didn't sacrifice actual daily usability. That was their sales pitch: Want luxury? Grab a Benz. Care about the actual driving experience? Here's your car.

I really don't know what happened after 2005, and it wasn't overnight, but the general driving experience of the cars has declined every generation since then - steering's gotten a bit more numb, suspension's not quite as communicative, engine noises are more muffled, and they just seemed to lose the thread over the years. I'm not sure if some of it was leaning into technology at the expense of the driving experience, but aside from the one or two models per generation that still have some of the old soul, they really don't seem to know what their sales pitch is anymore.

> BMW put out a car that shared a platform with a Toyota, in a move that should've caused a plague of locust to descend on Munich if God existed and had a driver's license

Why is this bad on BMW? Doesn't Toyota make the most reliable cars?

The BMW Z4 2018 and later models shares platform with the Toyota Supra 2019 and later. The platform, at least according to both brands marketing, was co-developed, and it is manufactured in Austria by a 3rd party that also built cars for other brands.

And no, Toyota doesn't make the most reliable cars. It might have been true for some period of time, but isn't true for every model and every year (even Corolla, often suggested as a very reliable sedan, has some versions that are in fact infamous for their tendency for oil sludge buildup that result in engine failures).

It’s nothing to do with the reliability. It’d be like finding out that Apple had shipped a laptop based on Dell internals - whatever the results, it’d indicate something tectonic had happened in Cupertino. It’s just not something the company would have even considered a decade or so ago.