This ties into the “good economy” misperception. While relatively cheaper to purchase than in the past, extra/third cars are prohibitively expensive to own and maintain for teens and low-income households. HS age teens are also discouraged from carpooling by the passenger restrictions on licenses.
Yep. The price relative to the past is comparable if not lower for entry level models, but other costs for so much of the rest of life have increased to where we can’t just hand Detroit a paycheck every month for a few years.
Maybe this was a rural thing, but when I was a teen, we got $2000 shitboxes with seatbelts and clapped out engines that could do the quarter mile in under a minute, if we were lucky. Seems harder to pull off these days
