Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn’t been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.
Cash for clunkers and other programs killed the used market.
That ended 14 years ago.
The car companies just moved up market, nobody cares about affordable cars.
Then inflation didn’t help.
How old do you think the $5k cars would be if they were on the market?
I won’t say it didn’t hurt, but the article is about 15k cars.
They do specifically list out the fraction of the market each price bracket constitutes though. This feels more specifically targeted at the kinds of PF advice that would say to look for a “decent condition low miles” beater for $5k. This shows that segment of the market literally does not exist anymore. The equivalent cars are now $15k+ which has VASTLY outstripped inflation from when I first started seeing that rhetoric (2010 or so).
This is not true, the used market was still great pre-covid. COVID obliterated new vehicle pricing and availability, and naturally the used market followed