25k is still too fucking much.

8999 and we can start having a conversation, people can’t afford a 25k new car for gods sake.

It's not the 90s. Once you put it on finance, it's often cheaper than a monthly rail pass. Depending obviously on where you are and how often you travel. And also far cheaper than doing the same trip on taxis/uber even just a few days a month.

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outime 35 minutes ago | parent [-]

>Once you put it on finance, it's often cheaper than a monthly rail pass

Cannot this be said about anything? Choose a long enough finance and it's "cheap". Let's forget you'd be paying (at least in Europe) easily 1.6x the price of the car because of the small payments.

	▲	pjc50 17 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		True, but it enables you to compare things against those which you can't buy upfront. London Travelcard zones 1-6 is £3264 annually or £313/month, but there's no option to buy multiple years in advance as if you were buying a car outright. £313/mo is more expensive than the cheapest new car leases, but you wouldn't want to drive a car through London zone 1, and you'd have to pay £18/day in the congestion zone.

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SirFredman an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you can't afford a new car, just buy a second hand one?

	▲	gib444 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"New and used vehicles are substitutes. When the price of a good’s substitute increases, the demand curve for that good shifts outward and the equilibrium price and quantity supplied both increase. Thus, increasing the quality-adjusted price of new vehicles will result in an increase in equilibrium price and quantity of used vehicles....Practically, when new vehicles become more expensive, demand for used vehicles increases (and these used vehicles become more expensive" https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-04/Final-TS... Being interested in/annoyed at the price of new cars even as a second-hand car buyer is somewhat justified

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daliusd an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

8999 euros that's very good cargo e-bike territory. I think that's naive to expect car in the same price range.

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ben_w an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This is why "financing" and "second hand" exist.

That said, if the EU car industry falls over completely*, there's no longer a reason for protectionist trade rules, and the EU then gets the benefit of cheaper Chinese cars.

* Short-term, Trump's tariffs and the significance of the US as an export market to several major EU producers are bad; long-term, China's actually really good at this and out-competing all western production, US and EU. Just like the chicken and egg, which comes first of "governments stop protecting the industry because the industry is important" and "the industry stops being important because the government stopped protecting it" is… well, "stop assuming all eggs have to contain chickens": there's plenty of ways either could fail independently of the other, but when it fails, the mutual support goes with it and it stays down.