There's some funny math in this study when you actually go to the data pool sourced. For example:
"Truck SUVs" and "Car SUVs" are delineated in a way that makes absolutely no sense when there's barely any of the former left on the market compared to 2003 yet their market share has allegedly dramatically increased overall. People simply are
not buying 4-5 times as many Tahoes and Expeditions and 4Runners as they are basically anything that isn't a variation of those combined; but when you say "any SUV that has 4WD is a 'truck SUV'" you can make the data say whatever the hell you want. Yes, said data provided
is the EPA's moronic classifications, but despite that Consumer Reports is contorting themselves to have their data/classifications fit the EPA's functionally useless ones.
I also suspect their conclusions about price trends would resonate a bit better if they didn't try to blow off things so obviously when they don't fit the conclusion they wanted the data to spit out. "Only two other individual models... also became more expensive" while those models happen to consist of the best selling model in the US for basically that entire time period analyzed and another one whose name practically became a synonym for "midsized SUV." Their justification for dismissing the data that doesn't fit their argument also approaches outright lying:
“The Explorer was once little more than a closed-in pickup truck; now it’s a luxurious, full-featured vehicle,” Fisher says. “And the F-150 has grown over the years in size, performance, and capability into the premium vehicle it is now.”
That wasn't really true when the Explorer came out (the glorified pickup truck is what the Explorer
replaced); and it certainly wasn't true in 2003. It's why the Explorer sold 300-400 thousand every year all the way up until the housing bubble burst and the Bronco II struggled to average 100k per year. The beginning of their study also coincided with end of the generation of the F-Series where Ford explicitly repositioned it as a more premium product; compared to ten years earlier when it dated back to the 1970s. If this study trended 30 years from the early 90s to now, these conclusions would hold more weight.
On that topic tough, it is also pretty suspect that
only the F150 has notably increased in price versus other metrics over the two decades, and not the other domestic trucks (plus Toyota). How could it possibly be true that only
Ford has seen a statistically notable price increase when the F-150 is the "benchmark" in the class? When all the domestic brands cost and performed about the same now and they all cost and performed about the same in 2003? And how could pickup trucks
not have a statistically significant increase in price when their prices have inflated in lockstep with large SUV prices and lower priced options (that were on their last breath in the mid-2000s) have been completely eliminated over the period of this study?
A side note:
One vehicle class (midsized cars) and two specific models (the Volkswagen Jetta and Passat) actually decreased in price relative to inflation.
Yes, and everyone who doesn't get their auto news from Consumer Reports is well aware of the debasement VW did to those two nameplates to get that to happen.
I also have an
extreme criticism of Consumer Reports' attempt to play the blame game but then eat their cake too:
Another is that many of them look at average transaction prices across all car sales. But that’s misleading, Harto says, because consumers have come to favor more expensive crossovers and SUVs over less expensive small cars. In other words, it’s not that cars are getting more expensive but that consumers are choosing to purchase more expensive types of vehicles. Sales of SUVs doubled from 26 percent to 56 percent of the market during the study period, while car sales fell from 50 percent to 26 percent.
The bottom line, Harto says, is that “policymakers should keep their foot on the gas in insisting that automakers continue to deliver efficiency and safety improvements, which these findings show to be unambiguously good for consumers.”
Policy makers are in fact
directly responsible for the extreme shift in the market away from more affordable more efficient small cars over the period, because policy makers directly incentivized manufacturers to shift their product lineups to larger SUVs to the extent of eliminating any desire for them to sell smaller cars at all. The chicken and egg here is obvious, and it has
always been obvious and it was
never purely consumer driven. You tell manufacturers that they not only don't have to make small affordable cars (or pretend small affordable cars are actually SUVs) with narrow margins to try and game the fleet wide fuel economy but punish them for doing that and instead
actively make it beneficial to pursue more larger vehicles that they can charge more for and not spend as much on meeting regulations with and they are
going to do that.
However, the true elephant in the room for the whole argument that sidesteps basically all of the data collected (no matter how fishy some of it may be) is that upfront purchase price is not the only aspect of a car's cost. Cars are more reliable generally than they were 20 years ago (though I suspect we're well past diminishing returns on that compared to cars of the early 90s vs the early 2000s until electrification takes hold) but what of maintenance? What of parts? Are cars made in the past 5 years going to outlive the cars made in the fifteen years before that?
I don't think they will so long as the majority of the states in the country continue to have safety and emissions inspections; nor do I think "five digit fuel savings!" would be at the top of someone's mind when they need to shell out a grand every time they need to have a light fixture replaced or every time some mandated piece of safety equipment has a sensor failure and forces their car into limp mode and the warranty either won't cover it or is already out because they have it financed on a 7 year note.
www.consumerreports.org
