Americans Are Spending More Money to Drive Worse Cars | Hacker News Reader

Americans Are Spending More Money to Drive Worse Cars

theatlantic.com

42 pointsfortran7789 comments

The transformation in Australia has been remarkable. Chinese electric vehicles are now everywhere.

In Australia Chinese cars had 4% of the market in 2020. They now have 35% and Chinese cars have the greatest share of any country.

https://www.anz.com/institutional/insights/articles/2026/07/...

Just as an aside, Australia is odd in that it has positive trade balance with China because Australia sells so much iron ore and coal there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...

> They now have 35%

Is this of new car sales? Surely they've not taken over a third of the entire fleet in a few years.

Yes.

Sorry, should have said they have a 35% share of new car sales, up from 4% just a few years ago.

Same here (not Australia). A few years ago pretty much all the pure-EVs were Teslas and those were pretty rare, now the main brand seems to be BYD from a combination of them being far better value for money and people not wanting to drive a Swasticar. The other day I came back from the airport in an electric bus, switched to another electric bus, and did the last bit in a Bolt BYD.

I want an electric car that has tactile buttons, an instrument cluster and doesn't put the entire brain of a car in a mobile app controlled by a remote server.

That car costs $200k in the US.

Outside of North America, the cars are really good and affordable. So it's out there. We are clearly doing something wrong here.

Reality check: US is by far the cheapest market for new cars, because of insane volumes and competition. Europeans shell out for a Golf as much as Americans do for a (even if shitty) monster truck. And a much higher proportion of their incomes.

Kia trucks and similiar classes of products (cheap, robust, no fancy features, intensely practical) are very common in some places (notably some parts of Asia) but are also extremely hard to find in the US, primarily due to regulatory reasons. BYD cars are also often cheaper than US options, but are also not available in the US.

According to the Volkswagen website, a Golf starts at €29,835 € (incl. VAT) while according to the Ford website, a Ford F150 XL (which isn't exactly a monster truck) starts at $39,585 which Google tells me is around €35,263 (excl. VAT).

Everything comes in comparison! By EU standards, it IS absolutely a monster fucking truck.

Yeah, good luck parking that anywhere in Europe parking spots or drive it through downtowns.

I grew up close to the US base Ederle in Italy. Plenty of the cars that the US folks that brought over were in rough conditions (scratches, dents, ...).

You forgot to include the sales tax and any other vehicle taxes (since you included VAT, it should be a fair comparison that includes tax).

That makes the original statement even less accurate.

Europe is not necessarily the correct example as it artificially tweaks the market the same way USA do: with tariffs.

Look at latin america, asia, africa or oceania. Chinese cars everywhere, and not only electric, ICE market is also flooded with brands named after seemingly random letters like on those chinese electronics sold on amazon.

Counterfactual: Europeans pay far more for both their cars and fuel than Americans do. This historical disadvantage forced brutal competition in weight and fuel efficiency, making European cars technically far superior in those areas.

Furthermore, strict emission regulations and the influx of Chinese EVs have pushed the European auto industry into massive investments in electrification. Today, leaving Tesla, Korean, and Chinese automakers aside, the only legacy manufacturers with their entire structure transformed and dedicated platforms ready for the EV era are the Europeans: VW Group, BMW, Mercedes, Stellantis, and Renault.

That's the big problem for traditional American and Japanese automakers: they got comfortable relying on gas trucks and hybrids, respectively, and are falling way behind in the global race.

I want any car that doesn't spy on me for the profit of the manufacturer. Any car that I don't have to wonder if someone could gain remote access on the back of the manufacturer's data connection and use that to injure or kill me. At present the only option is (at least in general) physically disconnecting or otherwise damaging the modem which places you at risk of not receiving software recalls and prevents first responders from being automatically notified in the event of a serious crash.

Bottom line: You're probably looking for a 4th gen 4Runner with the 2UZ-FE ;)

Grave concerns, especially after some of the research on canbus and vehicle network vulnerabilities.

I want an electric car that isn't bound to the stealership and isn't a ticking time bomb when they stop maintaining the software. If my car doesn't go for 200,000 miles, I feel like I was cheated.

> I want an electric car that has tactile buttons, an instrument cluster and doesn't put the entire brain of a car in a mobile app controlled by a remote server.

> That car costs $200k in the US.

Which car is that?

I had no trouble finding such an EV in the US last year. My Hyundai Kona SEL EV has something like 50+ tactile buttons, an instrument cluster, everything I need works without the app, and was nowhere near $200k (the total was $34k).

They don't seem to be selling Kona EV in the US this year, but their other EVs are similar. Same with the Kia Niro and the other Kia EVs. I'm pretty sure Chevy EVs are similar as far as buttons and the instrument cluster goes, although I think they might be more app dependent. Oh, Nissan EVs were also similar, although I have no idea about their app use.

The Kia (or КИ) Niro is a rebadged Hyundai Kona, both based on the K3 platform. They share drivetrains, but the interfaces can differ quite a bit, e.g. with one using physical buttons and the other using capacitive buttons.

The Kia Niro and the Hyundai Kona are dramatically different vehicles visually. Same platform and EV drivetrain, sure. But to say it's a rebadge is incorrect.

It's also the same chassis.

Buy a Tesla and spend $200 on third party buttons? You can even vibe code them yourself for like $20 with esp32 and a macropad.

Americans are spending more on cars because Americans love cars/trucks and treat them as status symbols. Whenever I go to Europe on vacation, I see European families using small, affordable hatchbacks. They’re physically similar in size to Americans and so it’s not that Americans need massive vehicles because we are just larger.

Also, it feels like an "arms race" where people who are fearful on the road worry about being hit by a vehicle that is larger than their own. So they go big…

Then they speed, tailgate, scroll their phone, etc., as if they weren't a menace to everyone around them.

Also Europeans use public transport a lot. Friend of mine lives in a European city and has a car that probably hasn't been out of the garage in six months because there's no need for it. Another older friend got her drivers license when she was younger and eventually forgot how to drive, or possibly no longer felt comfortable doing it, because she never used it.

Gift link: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/10/americans-not...

Doesn't work!

And nobody's going to mention that new cars are all now surveillance devices on wheels? And less repairable?

High gas prices do persuade people. Look at the vehicle fleet in California compared to the other states. It is very different and the gas is only slightly more expensive.

Californians get paid more on average, and car prices are mostly constant, so the higher price of electric cars is less of a barrier than in other places.

FWIW, electricity prices in CA are much more out of whack relative to the US average than gas prices.

California is actually not a great example because their electricity rates are insanely high as well. A better example would be WA state where gas prices are very high but electricity rates are some of the cheapest in the country due to cheap hydro.

It sounds like you are trying to back-construct the reality you want, that low electricity prices lead to higher fleet efficiency, but that's flawed. You should look at the reality on the ground. Washington actually has double the rate of pick-up trucks compared to California, higher than the national average.

They do it because they can. Country is rich and money is really no object to most consumers, so they buy what they subjectively "want", a car does not need to be "optimal" for them. And they want ICE cars because average age of a new car buyer is 53, they are buying what they are used to. That simple.

> Country is rich and money is really no object to most consumers

I take it you don't live here because that is an absurdly out of touch take. There's a massive stratification of wealth at present with a decent chunk of the younger population living paycheck to paycheck barely making rent (never mind hoping to ever own a home). On the far opposite side of the spectrum there's only a vanishingly small minority that sees money as "no object".

We certainly enjoy a high standard of living compared to much of the world and we're lucky enough to have cheap vehicles available but such specimens are far from what could be described as being in good condition.

Young people are irrelevant, they don't buy new cars at all. EV transition is about new car buyers. They are on average 53 and almost all 45+. These are doing just fine.

Yes, the exceedingly small fraction of people who are capable of purchasing high end luxury goods without a second thought are all doing just fine financially. That's a truism pretty much regardless of where you happen to be in the world.

I was young and poor once upon a time, drove a 20yr old Subaru that overheated constantly because the radiator fins had completely rusted out (when I drove through a large puddle, the rusted out front passenger footwell floorboard folded up as a gout of streetwater burst into the car), had CV joints made from recycled cardboard, had to push start the thing on flat ground, etc. I didn't buy my first home until I was in my late 30s. I saved money like miser.

fc417fc802, you too will be older someday (if bots get older, I don't really know), and you will shake your head at the youths too.

Yep America is so rich it cant afford free medical care for everyone, or paid holidays.

> Country is rich and money is really no object to most consumers

It's not that everyone is so rich they can afford these vehicles. Even people of relatively low income can walk off a lot with a big truck.

There are a ton of auto lenders out there happy to lend to people with long loan terms and less favorable interest rates. The average auto loan term is about 6 years, but 8 year terms are getting more common

If you see someone driving a big, brand new truck in the US, odds are they don't have a lot of money. Yes, they likely earn above average and didn't get it from a subprime lender, but they probably aren't "rich." They're just capable of getting a lot of debt, which is much easier to obtain.

https://youtu.be/GL_I6_0FcTg has a humorous take on it.

"X are spending more money to Y worse Z" is really the distillation of life under capitalism.

Yes capitalism is certainly known for continually decreasing quality of goods. That must be why life was so much better in 1800.

Industrialization and automation brought down the cost of goods, making them much more accessible to more people.

But they absolutely simultaneously resulted in lower quality goods in many areas.

As an example, people used to buy hand crafted furniture after buying an home, and it lasted them a lifetime because it was made with such high quality material and with such craftsmanship. It was also very expensive, which motivated keeping it for so long and passing it on to future generations.

Today the furniture we buy is much less expensive as a percentage of income but the quality is crap and you may end up needing to replace it once the finish has worn off because refinishing would be as expensive as buying another crap quality piece of furniture.

The same goes for clothing and many other goods.

It’s not that nobody makes any high quality goods anymore, but they are several times the price and are very low volume because of the cheap crappy alternatives.

> Today the furniture we buy is much less expensive as a percentage of income but the quality is crap and you may end up needing to replace it once the finish has worn off because refinishing would be as expensive as buying another crap quality piece of furniture.

But that's not a problem and is likely a good thing. eg it lets you move more often which reduces your commute.

Though none of my Ikea furniture has ever failed and most of it is ~15 years old.

> But that's not a problem and is likely a good thing. eg it lets you move more often which reduces your commute.

You can still move if furniture was more expensive and higher quality. You'd be able to sell what you have and buy new or used wherever you move. Most furniture is very consumable now so you just throw it away and buy new. You can't restore old furniture so the used market is full of stuff nobody really wants if they have the choice.

The used market in every city I've ever lived in has had plenty of forever furniture but it isn't cheap. Which is exactly what you'd expect.

> You can still move if furniture was more expensive and higher quality.

But it's so heavy!

> You can't restore old furniture so the used market is full of stuff nobody really wants if they have the choice.

My last mover actually did repair half of my furniture because he had a bunch of spare Ikea parts.

> It was also very expensive

> but they are several times the price and are very low volume because of the cheap crappy alternatives

So high quality goods were expensive and still are expensive.

Not sure what your point is.

> because refinishing would be as expensive as buying another crap quality piece of furniture.

In most cases refinishing won't even be an option. Veneered plywood is bad enough but MDF doesn't even have that and some cheap end tables and interior doors are literally just a sheet of veneer affixed to cardboard ribs.

Not that I'm complaining. Those end tables are seriously impressive pieces of engineering given what they're made of and can had for barely more than pocket change.

Also "back then" people didn't move 20 times over their lifetime.

I am sure that your life is better now thanks to the spy device always in your pocket and not because of the advances in medicine, education, human rights...

I hate these glib comments that don't remotely reflect reality.

Go look at the goods people got in countries that didn't practice capitalism. They were worse in almost every way, more expensive if you could get them and often the things people wanted were completely unavailable because there was no market incentive informing production.

In my experience, this sort of comment is usually followed up by some personal preference of the commenter. Great. I don't want the same thing, so I guess something has to mediate the resource allocation and effort of society towards providing that want/need at a certain quality/price.. and guess how we do that?

State regulations, to prevent market distortions like monopolies, price fixing, lying about products and selling poisoned food, among other things?

Are you looking at the USSR and countries that followed its model?

I don't think you can look at any authoritarian regime and make assumptions about how an economic system performs. The autocratic features tend to cause society to break down.

For an actual anarchist production model, look no further than Open Source. It's built by people who self organize, to solve problems that are real (and often to make silly, inefficient things). It's often (but not always) motivated by something other than profit. It's people who believe in a credo organizing themselves around that credo and building the tools to sustain that credo.

But imagine if open source was behind an autocrat, there's no way it'd be nearly as rich or flourishing.

> imagine if open source was behind an autocrat, there's no way it'd be nearly as rich or flourishing

Maybe not the best argument to anyone responding from their Linux computers, as Torvalds is generally viewed as Benevolent Dictator For Life.

I'd look for more examples, but using Wikipedia for any sourcing feels too on-the-nose, considering Jimmy Wales seems to be in a similar BDFL position

Voluntary hierarchy is different from autocracy. If the community really felt Linux was better worthy Linus, they could make that happen. Linus isn't operating secret police that scare the shit out of people.

"goods people got in countries that didn't practice capitalism" are generally built to last.

> something has to mediate the resource allocation and effort of society towards providing that want/need at a certain quality/price

Yeah, exactly, not "squeezing every last bit of value out of a product to appease the shareholders", see "enshittification".

> "goods people got in countries that didn't practice capitalism" are generally built to last.

No they are not. They were simple and people were poor so were forced for fix them for eternity, don't use them and absolutely not abuse them. Nobody gave a fuck about their craft in USSR. Everything was made from cheaply and from scraps.

Few things that might've survived (and I don't see _anything_ in my parents or in-laws homes) are literally prime example suvivorship bias.

> I don't want the same thing, so I guess something has to mediate the resource allocation and effort of society towards providing that want/need at a certain quality/price.. and guess how we do that?

This. Freedom of choice is the simplest way to describe the advantage of capitalism (free markets) over socialism. Obviously, markets don't solve everything, but the US certainly is not some anarcho-capitalist's libertarian fantasy.

I guess the lived memory of socialism's failures has passed and experience is the best teacher.

Sounds like a lucrative business opportunity to sell a higher quality product at a lower price!

Regulatory capture (occasionally outright banning a superior product, but usually just raising the cost of competition) as well as anti-competition wrapped up in acquisition culture severely impair this.

Namely, these and monopolies are the end-stage of unregulated Capitalism. The big guy becomes evil and makes it so no small guy can ever enter the stage again.

It’s a major part of why we have anti-trust law, because the country knew where it would all go.

Where is this place that has unregulated Capitalism?

Somalia is the traditional answer.

> The big guy becomes evil and makes it so no small guy can ever enter the stage again.

If you look at the top 10 companies by market cap every decade, you'll see the churn in them. The lineup in 1910:

• United States Steel Corporation • Standard Oil Company • American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) • Union Pacific Railroad / Pennsylvania Railroad • International Mercantile Marine Co. • American Tobacco Company • U.S. Rubber Co. • Central Leather Company • Amalgamated Copper Mining Company

And today:

1. Nvidia – ~$4.57 trillion 2. Apple Inc. (AAPL) – ~$4.04 trillion 3. Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL / GOOG) – ~$3.79 trillion 4. Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) – ~$3.63 trillion 5. Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN) – ~$2.70 trillion 6. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC / 2330.TW) – ~$2.14 trillion 7. Meta Platforms Inc. (META) – ~$1.81 trillion 8. Broadcom Inc. (AVGO) – ~$1.57 trillion 9. Tesla Inc. (TSLA) – ~$1.40 trillion 10. Eli Lilly and Co. (LLY) – ~$1.18 trillion

How is that a valid argument? They're not even in the same industry, let alone the same "stage" (market?). But the examples are good - for the opposite argument. Very few of them had problems because of a new company entering the stage.

US Steel - down because of deindustrialization, but it's still big

Standard Oil - broken up almost immediately by antitrust law

AT&T - also split by antitrust lawsuit, but then bought back the split companies and it's big again

Union Pacific - lost the top position because BN (from BNSF) bought more railroads than them, but it's still the second. It's also kind of hard to grow if you have to build rail tracks... in US.

Pennsylvania Railroad - failed to compete with interstate highways built in 30s and jet airlines starting from 60s when their main revenue was declining industrial heavy freight.

International Mercantile Marine Co. - might be a valid example

American Tobacco Company - broken by antitrust laws

U.S. Rubber Co. - I don't think they were that big in 1910. There were a lot of competitors.

Central Leather Company - ran out of leather and the investors liquidated the company to buy oil and gas shares instead

Amalgamated Copper Mining Company - ran out of copper.

Don't like the 1910 example? Try this one over the years:

https://www.charts.fyi/market-cap-evolution

What happened to Sears? IBM? etc.

The idea that giant companies grow to take over the world doesn't fit the data.

Why do you say "Union Pacific Railroad / Pennsylvania Railroad" as one entry? They were not under the same ownership, or affiliated in some other way, in 1910, so far as I know.

I copy/pasted it from google.

> no small guy can ever enter the stage again

Musk showed that to be wrong.

100%. Musk showed that you don't have to be an elected official in the federal government to be willfully complicit in deaths of hundreds of thousands around the globe.

That already exists. If it weren’t for punitive tariffs, we’d already be enjoying cheap, high quality Chinese vehicles in the U.S. and Canada, like many other countries do already.

Let me know how your BYD dealership in Texas is going.

The device you're currently using is worse than the equivalent model was 10 years ago?

Over 30 years ago my family spent an _extra_ $1000 (in ~1993 dollars) on a computer system to upgrade from a 15" CRT to a 17" and increase the RAM from 16MB to 32MB.

Now compare clothing. Or Pyrex. Or the chocolate in candy bars.

Stop buying brands that coast on past clout.

The device I'm currently using has no headphone jack, no removable battery, no removable memory, no removable storage, a single solitary USB-A port and a locked-down BIOS that only lets you install Windows by default. All in the name of profit.

Yes, the device I'm currently using is worse than the equivalent model was 10 years ago. Thanks, capitalism.

Why did you buy it then? There are systems on the market still that have none of these issues.

Which ones? I would happily use the phone I had 10 years ago. It was smaller, fit into a pocket better and literally the only meaningful thing that got better in between is camera.

And if I go further into history, I loved my phone with physical querty keyboard (nokia). There is no such thing on the market now, but I would love physical keyboard again.

> I would happily use the phone I had 10 years ago

> There is no such thing on the market now

Good news, the ~12-year-old BlackBerry Q20 is back, and shipping, [0] with an updated motherboard. It's a real product, not vaporware; I have two. It has a headphone jack, a small form-factor, removable micro-SD card slot, and a battery that takes little more than a guitar pick and #0 Philips screwdriver to replace.

Parts are cheap as hell as well, with a new screen costing under $25USD, and replacement keyboards under $30.

There's multiple clean sheet designs [1,2] of similar devices as well.

Though I expect them to be treated like fun little runabout cars: made for (typically young) people that can't justify the cost, leaving nobody to buy them, who then bemoan their discontinuation... due to poor sales

[0] https://zinwa.com/product/q25-full-device/

[1] https://zinwa.com/product/p26-full-device-pre-order/

[2] https://www.clicksphone.com/ca/communicator

He said "Nokia". Nokia had usable keyboards, not that tiny BB thing where you need child fingers type with.

  https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_e70-review-96.php
  https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_e90-1857.php
  https://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_5730_xpressmusic-review-385.php

I had the E70 for many years. The keyboard was amazing, even better than the E90.

The comment I replied to was specifically referring to a laptop.

But on phones, the base model Pixel phones (6 inch) are a pretty good size balance IMO. I would not go bigger than that but it's probably very dependent on things like hand size. And I honestly don't want a physical keyboard on a phone now because swipe/gesture typing is so much better than pressing tiny buttons, even if they had physical feedback.

Well it lasted 10 years less for pretty much same thing... Talking about my 27" 1440p monitor. Dell is still working. The 4 year old Asus have most likely some type of power issue and doesn't even want to start.

> The device you're currently using is worse than the equivalent model was 10 years ago?

It is increasingly less and less mine at every iteration. I owned every bit of my dad's 386.

Just because a group claims an -ist or puts an -ism in their name doesn't make them so. The NAZIs weren't socialist, they locked them up. The CCP isn't communist except in name. Russia has been an oligarchy since before the wall fell.

And what we have in the US right now is not a free market, nor a well regulated and efficient one. You can call it crony capitalism, if you want, but when banks are bailed out to the tune of $Ts, Federal deficit spending is responsible for "positive" economic growth, and speculative companies are shoved into the indexes that make up what savings the working class has, it barely makes the cut.

Plenty of more "socialist" places with with free healthcare and rule of law, are more market capitalist. Enshitification happens where it is allowed to, because it is allowed to.

Paywall. Can't read!

The article laments that we are cut off from the $22K BYD Dolphin Surf, but completely ignores why.

Policymakers want us to adopt electric cars, but they also want to protect domestic industries from competition. The result is entirely predictable. The American consumer is forced to pay more for fewer choices.

If you want mass adoption, you cannot artificially restrict the supply of affordable vehicles and then act surprised when people stick with what they know.

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