When we start decent seeing vehicles to a decent price again,
I don’t know about the Volkswagen ID.3, but in general, I think that car prices have tended to come down slightly over the years. I was in a conversation earlier about car prices earlier (talking about how truck prices had greatly increased).
If you go back 20 years, take a pretty plain-Jane standby, the Toyota Camry:
2005 Toyota Camry pricing starts at $4,091 for the Camry LE Sedan 4D, which had a starting MSRP of $20,515 when new.
That’d be $33,934.10 in 2025 dollars.
A 2025 Camry has an MSRP of $28,700, about 15% lower.
Pickup trucks — which are considerably more expensive now in the US than they were a few decades back — are an exception to this, but there are other factors going on there.
EDIT: Though tariffs may wind up driving prices up.
I don’t think this factors in things that have gone up significantly, such as cost of repair and maintenance. I think another easy thing to point to would be the amount of 84 month car loans, and how many people struggle to pay those. I will also point out in 2005 that wage inflation was much closer to keeping pace with overall inflation. It’s easy to point to the one thing you did, but that misses the full picture imo.
I don’t know about the Volkswagen ID.3, but in general, I think that car prices have tended to come down slightly over the years. I was in a conversation earlier about car prices earlier (talking about how truck prices had greatly increased).
If you go back 20 years, take a pretty plain-Jane standby, the Toyota Camry:
https://www.kbb.com/toyota/camry/2005/
That’d be $33,934.10 in 2025 dollars.
A 2025 Camry has an MSRP of $28,700, about 15% lower.
Pickup trucks — which are considerably more expensive now in the US than they were a few decades back — are an exception to this, but there are other factors going on there.
EDIT: Though tariffs may wind up driving prices up.
I don’t think this factors in things that have gone up significantly, such as cost of repair and maintenance. I think another easy thing to point to would be the amount of 84 month car loans, and how many people struggle to pay those. I will also point out in 2005 that wage inflation was much closer to keeping pace with overall inflation. It’s easy to point to the one thing you did, but that misses the full picture imo.