The Quiet Death of the Cheap, Honest Car

Read the week's news with us. Lexus stands up a three-row electric SUV, an electric version of its bread-and-butter sedan, and a storefront with a bamboo garden, and forgets to print a single price. Lincoln lifts the most considered chair out of its largest SUV and sets it on an elevated public walkway in Manhattan, a sanctuary you can visit but cannot buy. Jaguar runs an electric grand tourer through Monaco. The machinery gets richer by the week, and the showroom floor rises under it like water under a dock.

There is a car missing from all of it. Nobody filed its obituary, so we will.

Let it be said plainly, so no future buyer can claim it went unsaid: Drive Observer takes no position on electrification. We do not lament the engine. We do not cheer the battery. A car may be moved by gasoline, by diesel, by current drawn from a wire, or by the wrath of God, and this institution will judge it on its merits and on nothing else. The funeral this week is not for a fuel. It is for a price.

A nation that cannot sell its young people a plain new car has stopped building for them and started building at them.

Understand what is being taken. Not a trim level. Not an entry badge on a sheet. The plain, cheap, honest new car, the one with crank windows in living memory and a warranty and a smell of nothing, the one a young person bought new because it was the first new thing they had ever owned. That car was never the magazine's favorite. It was the country's. It got people to the second shift and the first apartment and the hospital at two in the morning, and it asked for nothing back but oil.

The industry will tell you the buyer wanted more. The buyer wanted a screen the size of a card table, three rows, a heated everything, and a payment that outlives the loan. We do not believe the buyer was asked. We believe the buyer was sold, which is a different verb, and that the cheapest thing on the lot was quietly retired the way a company retires a product that earns it too little: without a press release, without a vote, in the slow erosion of the order sheet where the public is never invited.

A market does not lose its floor all at once. It loses it one walk-up at a time, each model a little richer than the one it replaced, each redesign adding a feature nobody marched for and removing the option that kept the number honest. First the base engine. Then the cloth seat. Then, soon, the whole idea that a new car is a thing an ordinary person buys with ordinary money. We are assured each step is small. The steps are always small. That is how the bottom is taken out of a thing from underneath, while everyone is looking at the bamboo garden.

There is a particular dishonesty in a week where three luxury houses stage rooms and gardens and Monaco streets and not one of them prints a price. Pricing is the only sentence in the brochure the customer cannot argue with. A company that builds an immersive experience instead of a window sticker has decided you should feel something about the car before you find out you cannot afford it. We notice. We are paid to notice.

A nation that cannot sell its young people a plain new car has stopped building for them and started building at them. The used lot fills with what the lease returned. The new lot fills with what the rich renew. And the person standing between the two, the one who simply wanted reliable transportation bought new and owned outright, is told there is nothing here for them, and to come back when they have grown into the only segment left.

We are aware that this is, at bottom, a complaint about money, and that the world has graver complaints. We do not care. The cheap car was never about cheapness. It was about access, and access is the whole promise of the automobile, the one thing it offered that the horse and the rich man's carriage never did. Take the floor out of the market and you have not refined the car. You have closed the road.

Drive Observer holds, and will go on holding, that the affordable new car is not a relic of a poorer age. It was the best thing this industry ever did. When the last honest, plainly priced new car can no longer be had by a person of ordinary means, that day will not pass on this masthead in silence. It will be marked, and it will be mourned, and the gardens built over its grave will be described exactly as they are.

Drive that.