Nah, the cost of the electronics and lighting are very minimal; they are higher margin (like most luxury components), but an extremely stripped down model Hyundai Venue is the lowest priced new car you can buy, and it's about $20.5k right now, if you can find one that poorly equipped.
But if you look at the cost breakdown, of say a Chevy Trax, you get:
$21k - most stripped down (LS trim)
$25k - best equipped (2RS trim)
The difference between the basic trim and best trim is about 20% of the base-price. That's pretty consistent across the industry, between 18%-25% being the majority of gaps.
All new cars in the US must have parts available to the owner, and must be not prohibited from being repaired by any shop. It is illegal for them to prevent you from obtaining replacement parts or having a non-dealer approved shop doing repairs. So your entire premise is wrong.
The reasons cars are expensive is that raw materials are very expensive, and in the US, for US-assembled cars, healthcare is very expensive. Those are the two largest costs of a new car in the US today. The next are transportation of the components and final car, and labor.
Finally, no one should take the OPs premise too seriously. The US is the 1st or 2nd largest car market in the world, depending on how you count. There are 15-17 million new cars and trucks sold yearly, and that number is steady or growing, not declining. The average cost is not close to the lowest price, but rather, it's $49k in 2025. So despite some people complaining, there has yet to be demand destruction from high prices, meaning.. people are still buying new cars.
Yeah, weirdly cutting over to a universal healthcare system in the US would potentially create a price collapse for every labor intensive good or service to the extent it was labor intensive.
Yes, healthcare for employees and retires is a huge cost.
For example, for sells 2 million cars and light trucks in the US, and spends about $1.2B on healthcare for employees and retires, directly. So that's $600 of every cars purchase price is just to cover healthcare costs.
Fords entire net-income/free-cash flow is about $3.5B, so put it another way, Ford is spending 25% of it's entire profits on healthcare for it's employees.
Put another way, for example: Ford's total revenue is about $180B, say.
$170B is that COGS - cost of goods sold. That includes most expenses including labor, materials, transportation, taxes, tarrifs, etc.
$170B, about $100B of that is just raw materials
About $15B of that is direct payroll. That leaves about $55B for all other operations: debt-service, taxes, physical buildings, transportation, advertising, franchise operations, general admin, etc.
Healthcare is rising 3X the cost of everything else.
The craziest thing about this is despite healthcare increasing in cost so rapidly, healthcare quality and accessibility are decreasing. And this is one of the few instances where we really can pin all the blame on one thing: the insurance companies.
When people say they want Medicare For All, we generally don't mention benefits like this, but M4A would save Americans a LOT of money, assuming we also get good consumer protections with it and maybe a few decent anti-monopoly laws. The tax argument from the Republicans is about as false as arguments get.
Yeah, without a doubt, Americans are paying 2X more than anyone else in the world for healthcare.
The reason that the wealthy and upper income earners don't want to fix the system is because of incentives. There is scarcity, and they benefit from the market choice dynamics, without having to suffer any side effects: those are paid by poor people.
So at the poor end of buyer market for US healthcare people scrimp, save, coupon clip, and go without. And because of it: die younger, sicker, and less gracefully than poor people in other civilized countries.
At the end of the market, health insurance and private pay and high-end specialists cater their practice to the wealthy and upper-middle class, and get extremely rich doing so.
Fixing this would subject those upper middle, upper, and wealthy individuals to the facts that we don't have enough care to go around. And the one thing that we won't expect rich people in the US to do is hear "no" while they still have money to throw around.
No, the cost of delivering healthcare is irrespective of who pays for it. The employee from wages, the employer from revenue, a combination of both.
This is a problem with Americas economic competitiveness.
It's two problems.
First is that total spending per person in the US is.. $18k per year. Ford pays about $10k per person. McDonalds pays about $3k per person. The gap is paid for by the employees from wages, or by taxpayers. So one question is why does McD's only pay 1/3 of what Ford pays, and why do some other companies pay more (Google pays about $22k per employee, for example).
The second is that.. spending per person is $18k. This is 2X or 3X the amount of better countries. Japan pays $10k. Germany $9K. The UK about $8.5K. Canada spends $9K. These countries all have better outcomes and better health.
Canada in particular has basically mirror culture and demographic and health modalities.. but pays half. Because America is very poorly managed and run. And no employer can counteract that.
Since the GOP basically repealed the cost-control measures of the ACA, medical inflation is running 25-30% higher than general inflation rates. So a higher cost of everything is healthcare.
I’d be curious if the countries you mentioned have lower obesity/diabetes/heart disease rates than the US? Would that factor into healthcare costs? America seems to have a very unhealthy population compared to other developed countries, which I imagine would increase healthcare costs?
that's part of the better outcomes and better health part. it's a bit of a chicken/egg problem, where yes, being in poorer health to start is more expensive, but also because it's expensive, ppl delay their preventative healthcare and end up with bigger problems
"
All new cars in the US must have parts available to the owner, and must be not prohibited from being repaired by any shop. It is illegal for them to prevent you from obtaining replacement parts or having a non-dealer approved shop doing repairs
."
This may be true - however, the problem for independent repair shops and owner self repairs comes in when trying to diagnose the problem with the vehicle. On many of the 2025/26 models the car manufacturers require shops to purchase a yearly subscription (around $6000, a year, for each make car the shop works on) to access the information in the on board diagnostics of the vehicle. (the equivalent of plugging an OBD scanner tool into an older model car)
Most new vehicles require recalibration and/or reprogramming after replacing things like antilock brake modules or electronic power steering, and sometimes wheel speed sensors. That requires a separate subscription from the manufacturer.
All of your advanced safety features have to be recalibrated after any bodywork is done. Hell windshields even require recalibration now. And if you lose one of your keys and want to get another spare made - well that requires yet another subscription.
Then there's the software updates required to the ECM that have nothing to do with what your trying to repair but have to be done otherwise the vehicle goes into limp mode and won't drive.
It varies depending on the manufacturer but a clear pattern is emerging across the industry. It's obvious from my perspective (independent repair shop) that the vehicles are being designed as to prevent people from repairing them on their own.
Increasingly its not a mechanical failure causing the problem, it's a software or control module issue or something along those lines.
(Except with Nissan CVT transmissions and Hyundai Theta II Engines - those are mechanical)
Right - if you have $12k to spend on a car, lets say, you can't buy a new car, right now you are looking at a 8-10 year old used car to get a residual value in that range.
It's okay - it's always a good for people to learn and hear contradictory information. Even if it's unpopular or not received well, it's good to just say whats true.
But how many of those new vehicles are bought by businesses or fleet operators like cabs, and government agencies like police departments? The average age of cars on the road is 12.5 years. Ford just announced that third quarter sales for 2026 is down from 2027. Loans now go out to seven years. So the OP’s complaint should be taken seriously.
The overall number of new cars and light trucks is growing slightly or flat - the average age of cars is increasing because they’re better built year over year.
Reddit and the internet is just not a representative slice of America. Americans for better or worse love to spend 12-20% of their income on private transportation.
If it's legally required for parts to be available to an end user than why did I have to go to the dealer for an alternator on a 2021 RAM after 3 shops told me they couldn't order the part or program it, only the dealer could?
It probably meant that the shops wanted to use a non OEM part but there isn’t one. Or it wasn’t available. So you had to buy an OEM one from a licensed dealer affiliated with the OEM.
The law doesn’t require OEMs to sell to anyone - they only sell to their licensed dealers. But anyone including you the owner can buy that part from the dealer.
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u/Impossible_Offer7988 17d ago edited 17d ago
You don't, but they do.
That stuff will break, and it's so specialized that only they can repair it.
That is how they make their money they can charge you more because the cars are so loaded.
The cars are now filled with stuff that requires more (expensive maintenance)
that's two cases of putting money in their pockets.
Dealers and banks also now earn more (the manufacturer gets a cut of that as well).
So this is never gonna change.