That's just the average price of course. There are a few new models you can buy that are priced below 20K Euro. And you can get decent second hand ones below 10K.
More interesting thing is the shift to EVs and the fact that there are now cheap EVs. The cheapest new car is an EV. Roadside charging is expensive here. But with the high fuel prices still a lot cheaper than petrol.
People apparently feel pressured to buy expensive cars and spend all their money on those. It's a choice. I don't actually own a car. I don't see a good rational reason to spend hundreds of euros per month on having one, keeping it charged/fueled, maintained, parked, etc. All those things cost money. A couple of hundred per month adds up to a nice budget for public transport, taxis, and car rentals. I have a public transport card (Deutschland ticket) that costs me 65 Euro per month that covers most of my needs.
Roadside charging cost was about the same as the cost for gasoline/diesel before the war (cost per 10km). After the war it is around 30-40% cheaper than gaseoline/diesel.
But people forget that one seldom has to use roadside charging. It is mainly when going on vacation or longer weekend trips. For daily commute, shopping and regular weekly activities, you can charge at home or at work or at family.
Charging at home costs 1/3-1/6 of roadside charging. It's so cheap, but people don't seem to get it.
And as above comment says, EVs are also very cheap now. There are many smaller EVs, both Chinese and Europeans which cost around 20k EUR. Even a big ID.7 (Passat size) is not that expensive if you shop around a bit.
EDIT: And regarding roadside charging, with a subscription you can easily get 10-20% discount in case you do a lot of long distance driving.
Chinese manufacturers indeed make good offers e.g. BYD Seal Touring hybrid with 20 kWh battery and all features for around 30 T€, at that price you won’t even find the barebones version of a comparable car by any German manufacturer. They’re doing all they can to discredit Chinese car makers these days, it’s hilarious all these YouTubers driving the new BYD and trying to find the smallest little details to complain about.
German car industry only survives because its heavily subsidized and the government destroyed the used cars market.
> While that $51,109 figure is an all-time high, that's only up 2.1% in the past year. > > "A 2.1% year-over-year increase is actually below inflation," said Erin Keating, an executive analyst at Cox Automotive who co-authored the report
Eyeballing the graph in the source [1] I'm seeing ~2.5% annual price increases from 2013 to 2020 (CPI-U all items averaged 1.6% in that time) and ~2.5% annual price from January '24 to September '26 (3.4%).
Yet Jan '20 to Jan '23 saw car prices increase at 9.3% a year (5.1%).
In summary, we had a long period of habituation of a rate to which we've returned. But in between we had a rapid step up. That jump produces continuous sticker shock at each new level (particularly psychologically-meaningful ones) even though we've returned to trend.
(The fact that China is making, and we're banning the import of, good and cheap cars, cars one can experience across either of our land borders, is probably rubbing some salt in the wound.)
[1] https://www.coxautoinc.com/insights/sept-2026-atp-report/
Inflation targeting is an awkward compromise involving keeping unemployment up to avoid wage pressure. Asking for nominal pricing to go down is even more miserable. Even before accounting for the war consuming a huge area of the oil producing world.
Edit: while I'm here, some historical view from the UK https://www.parkers.co.uk/50-anniversary/costs-of-driving/
And the compromise only exists if all of a company's earnings are either reinvested or given away to workers, which is almost never true in capitalism. Eliminating shareholders would instantly make everything cheaper.
Even the part going to labor is very unequally distributed. If we paid executives less and everyone else more the median wage would go up, no other changes needed.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20260311215431/https://www.energ... [2] https://www.calculator.net/inflation-calculator.html?cstarti...
I wish this option were available to all.
Even for your physical and mental health, not spending a big part of your life stuck in a metal box is so much positive!
Kid activities used to be riding bikes around the local streets or other things they could walk / bus to. And I think it’s putting a massive toll on parents who have to spend all this time driving their kids around.
It’s like a damn Norman Rockwell painting here. Kids biking in groups with fishing rods is one of my favourite sites.
In my experience, the main opposition to this are the car owners themselves. Try to start a high speed rail project and they complain about the costs, how it needs to pay for itself, etc etc etc. Ask them if they would use the train, the answer is no with various dumb excuses like "too far to get to station without a car" "train doesn't go anywhere I need to" etc etc etc.
I'm car free and very smug about it because these people are the reason rail transportation isn't better funded. They are the first people to actively block it. So I make sure to wave at them and smile as my train passes them stuck in gridlock. I'm glad the price of cars nearly doubled in the last 5 years. I hope they double again in the next five years. The only way to fix this is to price them out.
Tragically, places that you can live without the expense of a car tend to be very expensive.
And even if America had a world-leading high speed rail network, that could not replace 95% of current car usage.
And beyond infill, there's simple density. If everyone's dream is a McMansion with a 2 acre lawn, there are precious few transportation infra options.
I hear people say all the time “my payment only went up $50 a month to get THIS”
They have no idea how much the vehicle costs, and how much they’ll pay in interest over the term. They also don’t care, because it’s a forever loan. They’ll roll it over to a new vehicle in a couple of years and just have a car payment for life.
We thought that referred to greedy corpos and Ubers and the like, but really they just meant banks (per usual)
But buying one on debt it’s the worst of both worlds.
Though it otherwise doesn't pull the punch on corporate greed.
Related, the U.S. may soon allow imports of Japanese "Kei" vehicles:
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/11/toyota-resurrects-scion...