Posted Monday, March 11, 2024 at 10:18pm
t’s easy to get distracted by what you want in a car: massaging seats, low range four-wheel-drive, a stereo with more speakers than Madison Square Garden, enough power to alter the earth’s axis. But beneath all those wants lie the needs — the basic building blocks of transportation that drive us to buy these expensive products.
Those needs, rather than wants, are what drive (no pun intended) folks at the lower end of the market — and in a very real sense, these are hard times for people looking to buy an affordable new car. The rise of the pickup truck as family transportation and the eternally growing popularity of the sport-utility vehicle, supercharged by a (recently ended) decade and a half of low interest rates and easy financing, have pushed automobile prices to new heights, all but shattering the market for conventional family cars.
