{"id":510670,"date":"2026-03-03T02:34:14","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T02:34:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/510670\/"},"modified":"2026-03-03T02:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-03-03T02:34:14","slug":"74-of-americans-say-new-cars-are-unaffordable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/510670\/","title":{"rendered":"74% Of Americans Say New Cars Are Unaffordable"},"content":{"rendered":"

If it feels like everything is more expensive these days<\/a>, and you’re struggling financially<\/a> even on what used to be a healthy income, you aren’t alone<\/a>. It may sometimes feel like you are, especially if you spend a lot of time on social media, but I promise plenty of other people are struggling, too. In fact, according to the latest\u00a0ABC News\/Washington Post\/Ipsos poll<\/a>, nearly half of those surveyed said they no longer make enough to maintain their standard of living, and 74% said they feel like new cars are unaffordable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In fact, more Americans consider new cars unaffordable than any other category covered in the survey, including a weeklong vacation (60%), healthcare (56%), going out to dinner (49%), groceries (45%), home energy\/utilities (45%), their current rent\/mortgage (37%), and gasoline (28%). So yeah, you may not be able to afford to replace your old car, but at least you can probably still afford to put gas in it. That’s something. Sort of.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As you can imagine, affordability is a much bigger issue for lower-income Americans, but middle-income families are still feeling the squeeze, too. While 87%\u00a0of those making less than $50,000 consider new cars affordable, that figure only dropped to 82% among those making between $50,000 and $100,000. Meanwhile, among individuals with incomes greater than $100,000, 64% still consider new cars unaffordable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since young people don’t have any money, you’d also probably expect there to be a divide among age groups, and there is, but the vast majority of older Americans find new cars to be unaffordable, too. In the survey, 82% of those between the ages of 18 and 49 said new cars are unaffordable, while 67% of those over 50 said the same. Put another way, for every American over 50 who feels like new cars are still affordable, two would say the opposite.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If it feels like everything is more expensive these days, and you’re struggling financially even on what used…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":510671,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[45,49,48,46],"class_list":["post-510670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=510670"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/510670\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/510671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=510670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=510670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=510670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}