SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 This story began as a personal observation. My kids are reaching the age when I am starting to pay attention to what it might cost to get them starter cars. What I found is that it costs a whole lot more than it did just a few years ago, and the culprit is a lot more than inflation.<\/p>\n
For years, $20,000 meant a starter car. It was not fancy or flashy, but it was new.<\/p>\n
Now, that kind of car is almost extinct.<\/p>\n
According to Edmunds<\/a>, just 0.2% of new vehicles sold in 2025 cost $20,000 or less. Fewer than 5% sold for less than $25,000.<\/p>\n “They are indeed unaffordable for the vast majority of the American buying public,” said Ray Shefska, who has spent nearly 50 years in the car business and is the co-founder of CarEdge<\/a>.<\/p>\n Shefska said inflation is not the only reason new cars have become so expensive.<\/p>\n “It’s much more profitable for the automobile manufacturers to build high-profit-margin, high-priced vehicles than it is to build low-profit-margin, low-priced vehicles,” he said.<\/p>\n In other words, automakers are not simply charging more for cheap cars. They are building fewer cheap cars.<\/p>\n It is a trend some in the automotive industry call “trimflation.”<\/p>\n Asked to explain the term, Shefska said, “Well, what happened was that many of the automakers just stopped building the base model vehicles with very few, frills in it.”<\/p>\n When the cheaper version disappears, the next trim level becomes the new base model \u2014 and the buyer pays more.<\/p>\n So, what is the solution?<\/p>\n “I think ultimately, perhaps, maybe cheap Chinese vehicles,” Shefska said. “I almost see us becoming a nation that looks a lot like Thailand, where there’s a lot of motorcycles and motor scooters and electric bikes, but not a lot of cars because people can’t afford cars.”<\/p>\n That may be a practical solution for some people, but not for everyone.<\/p>\n For buyers who need a trunk, or even a passenger seat, the best advice may be to separate their wants from their needs.<\/p>\n There are still a handful of new cars priced around $20,000: Nissan<\/a> has the Versa; Kia<\/a> has the K4; and Hyundai<\/a> has the Venue.<\/p>\n Buyers can also look to the used-car market, where there are more choices at lower prices.<\/p>\n \n The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SALT LAKE CITY \u2014 This story began as a personal observation. My kids are reaching the age when…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":791660,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[28,1302,3811,101,3812,134,3729,3,3813,3814,99,1505,2987,3324,2986],"class_list":["post-791659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-cars","tag-classifieds","tag-economy","tag-homes","tag-jobs","tag-local","tag-news","tag-radio","tag-salt-lake","tag-sports","tag-television","tag-traffic","tag-utah","tag-weather"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791659"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791659\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}