Write Your Congressman: Let the Price Hold the Line
Subaru priced its 2027 Crosstrek at $26,995, the same starting sticker as last year, and led with the held number like a civic act. Ask that an unchanged car keep an unchanged price, and never cost more for the crime of the calendar turning.
To the Honorable Member of Congress:
We write on behalf of the plainest thing a buyer is owed: that a car which gained nothing should not cost more next year.
Read what Subaru did this week and said out loud. It priced the 2027 Crosstrek and did not move it. By the maker's own account the starting sticker is $26,995, the same number as last year, no increase from the previous model year, and Subaru put the held price in its own headline, as though holding it were an accomplishment worth announcing. We do not charge any maker with raising the rent on an unchanged car this fall, and we name no one. We say only that a price which simply stays put has become rare enough to make news, and that it should not be.
Here is the plain trouble. A car returns in the autumn having gained nothing a driver can point to, a new paint name where the old one was, the same engine and the same seats, and the sticker climbs anyway. The industry calls it a model-year adjustment. The buyer calls it paying more for the car he already understood. The calendar turned. The machine did not.
We propose no statute, and we will not pretend a bill could set a fair price. No law drafts a sticker. We ask only for the plain equity Subaru demonstrated by accident: that an unchanged car earn an unchanged price, and that the number on the glass be equal to the machine behind it and not padded for the turn of the model year. Buy the car this year, and next year's identical car should cost what this year's did.
Let the price hold the line. Write back to us when you have.
Respectfully, The Editors