Cars were somewhat cheaper back then, but they were also a lot shittier. Most odometers only had 5 digits because getting it to 100,000 miles was unusual.
Advances in body materials made it so that they no longer disintegrated into rust by the 1980’s, and advances in machine tolerances and factory procedures made it so that cars were routinely hitting 100,000 miles or more by the 1990’s.
A 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner MSRPed for $2,945, in an era when minimum wage was $1.60/hour. That’s 1840 hours worked at minimum wage (46 weeks of full time work), for a car that could probably drive about 100,000 miles, and required a lot more active maintenance.
Now that cars last longer, too, the used car market exists in a way that the 1960s didn’t have. That makes it possible to buy a used car more easily, and for the new cars being purchased to retain a bit more value when they’re sold a few years later.
And that’s to say nothing of fuel economy, where a Roadrunner was getting something like 11 miles per gallon, or safety, back when even medium speed crashes were deadly.
The basic effect, in the end, is that the typical household in 2025 is spending a lower percentage of their budget on transportation, compared to the typical household in 1970.
The golden age for being able to buy and use cheap cars was probably around 2015-2020, before the used car market went nuts.
vvilld@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks ago
Yes, it was easier for just anyone to buy a car. Now do the rest of the stuff in that post. None of it was accessible to someone who wasn’t a upper-middle class cishet white dude in the late 60s.