We Aren't Ready for Car-pocalypse
Cars are becoming a luxury good, but we've spent 100 years treating them as a necessity
Welcome to another edition of Willoughby Hills!
This newsletter explores topics like history, culture, work, urbanism, transportation, travel, agriculture, self-sufficiency, and more.
Owning a car has been a huge piece of the American Dream for decades. At one time, there was a car for every stage of life, every possible taste, and every budget. Grandfathers drove Buicks and Cadillacs. Families drove minivans. Adventurers had Jeeps. Enthusiasts customized muscle cars. And budget-conscious drivers purchased fuel efficient hatchbacks and compacts.
Cars have also fundamentally changed our built environment. The farmlands and forest of a century ago have become the subdivisions and shopping centers of today, with their abundance of free parking. The interstate highway system connects major cities and small towns with its asphalt ribbon. It’s always a bit of a baffling thought that I could pull out of my driveway and there’s a continuous paved path that could take me to nearly anywhere that I could imagine in North America.
But new data suggests that even as cars have become ingrained in our way of life, the pendulum is swinging towards cars being considered a luxury good like a fur coat or a nice watch.
I’m not an expert at any of this, but as I look at it, we are not simply not ready for the coming car-pocalypse. Let me explain.
According to Kelley Blue Book, in September, the average price of a new car topped $50,000 for the first time ($50,080 to be precise). Some of what’s driving this trend is a preference in the American market for larger and more luxurious SUVs and pickup trucks and a push for electric vehicles, which carry a higher sticker value up front but can have lower fuel and maintenance costs over time.
Perhaps more troubling is data from Edumunds that 20% of new car loans have payments exceeding $1,000 and more than 22% of buyers opted for an 84 month loan term (7 years). We are financing more money than ever before, and we’re holding those loans for more time.
Keep in mind, that $1,000+ payment is only the cost of the car loan. There are other costs associated with driving that aren’t captured by that figure: gas, parking, tolls, insurance, car washes, oil changes, tires, and any unexpected repairs that might crop up.
These high transportation costs come as 42% of working Americans report living paycheck to paycheck, and the 1.1 million layoffs so far in 2025 means those paychecks aren’t coming in.
Even for those who can keep up with their car payments, cars are depreciating assets, meaning they lose value over time. It's not uncommon for a driver to be carrying a loan that’s worth more than the value of their car, which becomes a problem when they go to sell or if the car is damaged in an accident.
Data also shows that less people are opting for base model cars, instead choosing trim levels worth an estimated $11,500 more, or 33% over the vehicle’s starting price.
Automakers have all but abandoned the subcompact market. The Honda Fit, Toyota Yaris, Chevy Spark, and Ford Fiesta have all been discontinued. In 2025, the Nissan Versa was the only new car considered a subcompact. Ford has abandoned all cars altogether, focusing solely on the truck and SUV market. The last Ford sedan made was the 2020 Ford Fusion.
All of this means that buying a used car is also a more expensive proposition than it used to be. Used car prices are already up 6% this year and the average used car loan now spans 67.2 months (more than five years). If we only sell expensive new cars, we’ll only have expensive used cars in a few years.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my first car. In 2000 when I was a teenager, I bought a 1992 Volkswagen Fox. It was 8 years old at the time, which seemed woefully out of date back then. It was a super basic car manufactured in Brazil. It had no power steering and no power brakes. It didn’t even have a passenger side view mirror when I bought it, because the car was literally not manufactured with a right side mirror! (My dad later found a mirror in a junkyard that would fit and added it for me).
My Fox was a four speed manual transmission that got good gas mileage and probably only had about 70,000 miles on the odometer. It got me to high school and back and I even took it on some road trips around Ohio in the summers. It was quirky and stripped down, but it was also pretty reliable and fun to drive.
The cost for that 8 year old basic starter car in 2000? $1,700! And it was on a dealer’s lot. It likely would have cost even less had it been a private sale, but this was the era before Craigslist and Marketplace that made private sales easier. Translated to today’s money, that car cost $3,206, still quite a bargain!
There are increasingly fewer cars like my beloved Volkswagen Fox being sold brand new today. Even entry level cars come packed with technology that improves safety, comfort, and entertainment, but that all comes at an added cost.
I believe all of this means that we’re headed to a place where cars of all kinds are going to be increasingly out of reach to lower and middle income Americans.
This is not surprising, as many consumer goods that were once considered accessible are increasingly becoming a luxury in our modern economy. A vacation to Walt Disney World was a rite of passage for generations past, but is now out of reach for many families. Ditto for everything from concert tickets to eating out in restaurants.
The problem with vehicle accessibility specifically, and why I say we’re headed towards a Car-pocalypse, is because owning a car in America today is not really optional. We’ve spent more than a century ensuring that life without a car is difficult if not impossible. Cars are necessary to life in America, for better or worse.
There are some exceptions to this rule, mostly in older cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Owning a car in Manhattan is unnecessary, maybe even unwise. It’s possible to live in the D.C. Metro, Philadelphia, or Chicago and not own a car.
When I first moved to Boston, I spent my first year without a car. I lived in a large apartment building that was within walking distance to most everything that I needed in terms of groceries and other necessities. The subway stopped directly across the street from my building, so when I needed to venture beyond my neighborhood, it was easy to get around.
Growing up as a suburban kid though, it took some adjustment to living without a car. The first time that I went to the grocery store, for example, I purchased things the way that my mom did when I would shop with her. I ended up with a heavy load of several plastic grocery bags that there was no possible way that I could get home on foot. I “borrowed” a shopping cart and pushed it through the street the four blocks or so to my apartment.
After that, I learned that it was better to do a few small trips per week to the store rather than one big weekly trip. I had to plan to not buy milk on the same day as other heavy items. It took some adjusting and adaptation, but I learned.
My experience in Boston is pretty unique for America though. Imagine trying to live car free in a place like Houston, Orlando, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, or Los Angeles. It may be theoretically possible, but it comes at a great sacrifice. Even in Boston, which has decent public transportation, if I had lived just a few miles further from the city, it would have been unimaginable to live without a car.
According to the World Economic Forum, just 1.2% of the land mass of the top 35 metropolitan areas in the U.S. are considered walkable urban areas. As I discussed on my podcast with Richard Rothstein, many of the once walkable places in this country were demolished earlier in the last century, often to displace people of color. These neighborhoods were replaced by interstates and other highways that made commuting into the cities easier for white people that fled to new suburbs, but they left many urban communities hallowed out.
Boston tried to mitigate some of this damage with The Big Dig, but the scars of this racist past persist today in smaller cities like Springfield, MA or Hartford, CT, where large swaths of once vibrant downtowns are either freeways or parking lots.
As I’ve written about many times before, even in places that should be walkable, there’s often too little infrastructure to support actually walking.
There may be some sidewalks, crosswalks, or bike lanes, but they’re often not fully connected to each other or well maintained enough to be safe (particularly in winter, when roads are cleared of snow quickly but sidewalks aren’t as consistently). In many places, these accommodations for any alternative to vehicles are simply nonexistent.
Public transportation could and should be a viable alternative to car use, but it is also something that we have devalued in this country. At one time, there were vast networks of trains and streetcars that covered our cities and towns. Today, that has been greatly reduced, sometimes replaced with spotty bus service, sometimes gone altogether.
I’ve shared this map in this newsletter before. The thick black line that runs across this image represents the Fitchburg Railroad in the 1800s, which ran between Boston and either Troy, NY, Saratoga, NY, or Bennington, VT. From that main train line, one could connect with streetcars and reach Lowell, Worcester, Northampton, or parts of Southern New Hampshire, Vermont, or Upstate New York.
Today, some portions of the Fitchburg Railroad tracks are still in use, connecting commuters traveling from Gardner, MA into Boston, with 17 stops along the line. It’s not designed with long haul travel or distant visits in mind. Aside from two connections to Boston’s subway system, one in Boston and one in Cambridge, there are no other rail connections. That giant tree of branching train lines spanning four states depicted in the 1800s has been reduced to a single stump.
There are some minor victories, like the governor in Massachusetts recently making most public transit systems outside of Boston fare free. This removes one hurdle to riding public transportation (and rightly recognizes transit as a public good even for those who are not on board). It’s helpful for some, but I would still have to walk about 2 miles (45 minutes) to reach the closest bus stop, and that bus line doesn’t go where I need to be.
The car-pocalypse as I’ve been describing it is largely an issue of affordability, but our car dependency has hurt us in other ways. Climate change is driven by fossil fuel consumption. I don’t think our childhood loneliness epidemic or our obesity epidemic are only a function of our built environment, but not being able to walk or bike anywhere certainly doesn’t help either of those things.
The heartbreaking piece in all of this is it didn’t have to be this way. About ten years ago, I traveled to Germany to film a story about German houses. Most of the houses are clustered together in walkable little villages, some that date back hundreds of years. This not only makes it convenient to live in the village, but it preserves open space between villages for farms, parks, and other uses that aren’t just houses and lawns.
It’s not just Germany. I recently was talking to an American friend who moved to Spain. She called me as she was walking home from an appointment. The concept was completely foreign to me, but for many cultures around the world, this is normal.
We could have done that here too. In fact, we used to.
The neighborhood where I grew up in Northeast Ohio mostly dated to the 1920s. Houses were tightly spaced and most services were within a short walk. At one time, there was even a streetcar at the end of my street that connected Cleveland to the west with Painesville to the east, a total distance of roughly 30 miles. The streetcar was long gone by the time I was born, replaced by three different bus routes operated by two different transit agencies (and even with those three buses, the whole streetcar route isn’t covered).
Expensive cars and big debt makes me think we’re in a financial bubble that’s about to burst. I could be misreading the tea leaves, but it feels like a necessary reality check.
Until that bubble bursts (or maybe when it does), I hope that we begin to finally take seriously all of the alternatives to personal vehicle transportation: walking, biking, public transit.
Some solutions don’t even need to be directly transit based. Embracing remote work for many jobs, like we did during the pandemic, could eliminate the need for so many cars on the road. If people only need a car for running local errands, rather than commuting long distances, they may reevaluate the size and cost of those cars. Our wallets will certainly benefit from safe and useful alternatives, as would our planet. The corporate return to office mandates of the last few years show that we’re a long way from that reality.
A car can (and maybe should) be a luxury good when there are abundant and safe alternatives to driving, but it requires the creative overhaul of many of our past structures and assumptions about houses, cities, and work. Until we get to that place, owning a car sadly continues to be a necessity for most Americans.
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