Average Car Price: $48,000, Yikes!
Maybe a dumb question.
Are Smart cars still for sale in the USA?
Hard pass on these rides…
When I attended UH, the average new car price in the U.S. was ~$3,000.00 and an average new house price was less than $30,000.00.
So Inflation is real!
No, Mercedes dropped it.
Some folks just want a vehicle that will take them from point a to point b.
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In the 1970’s I bought a brand new Chevy Malibu for under $3,000 and a brand new 4 bedroom house for $35,000.
You didn’t mention an exact year (which is fine), so I plugged in those numbers into an inflation calculator (I set it to Jan 1976).
That $3,000 car is $17,345.23 as of May 2025.
The house is $202,361.06
yikes, the cheapest car is 18K ?
i hadnt bought a new car since 2001, i got tired of it losing 50% of what i paid in 5 years; i let someone else pay that depreciation now. sedan depreciation image
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After a car crash that totalled my paid-off vehicle, I had to buy a new car back in early 2021 when dealerships had empty lots & new inventory was stuck sitting in containers on vessels right outsite port terminals.
Low supply made car prices go up & I ended up signing off on a brand new $34,000 Toyota Corolla LE…that didn’t even come with tinted windows 
I envy seeing a Corolla back in the low 20Ks
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In 1972 my parents bought a really nice, new 3-2-2 in Sagemont for $20,000. Seems like a lifetime ago now.
That’s nuts, for a Toyota Corolla.
It freakin’ sucked!
I did my homework, too, checking dealerships all over Houston & even TX (Dallas, Madisonville, Conroe, etc). It made no sense to buy a Pre-Owned vehicle since the price was only about $2k less.
Crazy times smh
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Mistake was looking at Toyota. I was looking around at cars about that time, and the Toyota dealers were the worst by far with markups. $10,000 on a $25,000 vehicle. I could go down the street to Mazda and Subaru and find little to no markups on cars and CUVs.
At least I hope you got paid fair value for your car instead of Blue Book, since Blue Book had not caught up with the reality of the used cars from what I saw.
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If you buy a Toyota in Texas, you get hammered twice, once by Gulf States Toyota, the distributor for the region, who adds a lot of crap to the cars before they allocate it to the dealer, then once the dealer gets it, they add all their unnecessary stuff. No wonder they fight tooth and nail to keep direct sales out of Texas, you know, a state the believes in business friendliness and less government.
You can only get value on Toyotas in Texas in the used market.
The car was bought in 1973, the house in 1974.
My gross pay was about $1,000 monthly. Wife did not work. One child.
I paid everything via my take home pay and we travelled some and did restaurants.
Not sure about today’s dollars in all of those numbers.
I feel you, we were in the same boat in early 2022. Forced to buy new because used was just stupid pricing.
Even on the new, we went to one dealership (Big Star) that had the exact car we wanted, and MSRP was decent. From everything we heard you just expected to pay MSRP, no way to negotiate down. Told salesperson which car we wanted and she said, “ok let me go talk to the GM”. My wife and are like, “wait are we about to negotiate?”
She came back with a price 20% over MSRP. Wife and I immediately laughed in her face involuntarily and stood up to leave. According to the salesperson “everyone” was charging 20% above MSRP.
We drove immediately to South Loop Hyundai and got the exact car we wanted at MSRP. Still felt screwed paying MSRP…I think we also had to wait a couple of days for the car to be unloaded at Port of Houston. Many of the cars they were selling were still out in the Gulf, and projected to take weeks to get to the dealership.
Definitely crazy times.
Incredible.
I forgot about that part when looking. They (Toyota dealer) had distributor add-ons for paint protection and dealer add-ons for the same paint protection. They were effectively double charging, and the sales rep could only say they were not negotiable.