Dacia does this in Europe, their lowest priced car that has exactly zero features comes in at 9999EUR with an optional spare wheel for an additional 150EUR.
If you want AC and a radio you’re looking at about 12k EUR, which definitely isn’t terrible. It’s a Renault subsidiary and you see a fair amount of them driving around.
So yeah, it’s not like offering an affordable bare-bone car isn’t possible in mature markets, it’s more likely that Americans just don’t have an appetite for them.
The affordable car is definitely being tested though. Renault discontinued the Twingo last year, which was their smallest car. Audi discontinued the A1, claiming there’s just no money to be made in their lowest segment.
It’s looking pretty bleak for the utilitarians among us, as electrification happens and safety features such as lane assist and emergency stop systems become mandatory, base prices will consistently be higher. You can only drive down the price of components so much.
The Audi A1 was over $30,000. That's not "testing the affordable car"! Honda HR-V and Honda Civics are selling like crazy (<$25,000). Ford Maverick at $20,000 sold out a YEAR before the vehicles had even been manufactured. America has a completely insatiable demand for <$20,000 vehicles but no one makes them.
The Fit wasn’t discontinued in North America for a lack of buyers. It was built in the same factory in Mexico where Honda builds the HR-V, which is a small crossover that is mechanically similar to the Fit. Honda found that the HR-V was more profitable and sold even better than the Fit, so they just dedicated the whole factory to HR-V production.
Sort of similar to Ford discontinuing the Focus despite it selling fairly well. It was a lot of effort for a narrow profit margin so they shifted into more profitable vehicles. A shame because the Focus and the Fit were both reasonable, affordable choices.
Worst part about discontinuing the Focus is that the Focus Electric went with it. Sure, it was a regulation-requirement car, but it drives well and does what city folks need; 100KM range is enough for most people's day. Works well as a second car.
We desperately need sub-20k electric cars and they just don't exist.
There are some nice functional design elements (for instance, the back seats are truly fold flat which provides a surprising amount of storage). That said, I am honestly tempted by going up market to a GTI for a little more fun in a similar package.
I do recommend a GTI -- any recent generation. Sometimes I use it like a "truck" by folding the rear seats flat. It also serves well on longer distance drives with folks in the backseats.
I will not part with my MK6, manual 6 speed, 2L turbo!
Notes:
There are younger folks now that won't bother with manual.
3G telemetry just expired (yay).
It's fun. And decent MPG.
My MK6 GTI M/T was totaled right after the pandemic started but before the used car market blew up. It took me a year to find a suitable replacement, but I was not budging on my requirement of an MK6 GTI (Oddly enough, my partner and I were borrowing a Saab 9-5 wagon from her dad while car hunting).
I found a 2012 M/T GTI being sold in Southern California and literally hopped on the next flight once I got confirmation that they’d sell it to me. I bought at asking ($6500, a steal just months later) and drove it back to Sacramento.
I never thought I’d be that kind of person to take a one-way flight to buy a car, but that MK6 GTI has changed me. It’s one of the few “modern” vehicles that is easy to do work on yourself. The chassis was designed to hold the larger 2.5L, 5-cylinder engine in the Golf so the smaller 2.0L Turbo left enough room to get in there and perform repairs/service without taking body panels off (cough cough BMW). Armed with a VCDS and a 10mm, I can diagnose and fix most minor things.
Super fun, easy to self service, manual transmission, not letting this go.
What you see on the road, on average, is what was selling well 12 years ago. Small cars tend to be more popular during long periods of bad economic times or high fuel prices. SUVs sell like hot cakes every time the US has a decade of good economic times and cheap gas.
The Fit started selling really well around the time of the 08 crash (and fuel more than doubled in price that decade):
Dacia is so cheap that they even omit features that you might not think of as "features".
The base model Dacia Duster doesn't come with height adjustment on the driver's seat or with a glovebox light, you need to upgrade to the Comfort package for those. It does interestingly come with a radio these days, back in the day that used to require one of the upgrade packages.
I drove an older (2000) Jeep Wrangler for much this reason. It came from the factory with no A/C and a bottom-tier AM/FM radio. The seat slides front to back and reclines - manually - but that’s about it. It has a heater, but didn’t work when I bought it in ~2010 and I’ve never bothered to fix it; I almost never used the rear windows when I had them, and I’ve since replaced the vinyl top with a much simpler one that doesn’t even have provision for them, so why bother?
It’s has a manual transmission and an inline 4-cylinder with very low output compared to most vehicles. Paradoxically, that combination makes it fun to drive.
It also holds its value very well. I’ve owned it for twelve of the 23 years of its life so far, and I could sell it today for more than I paid for it. At the same time, it’s extremely cheap to fix, because the design hasn’t changed often over the years and the powertrain is shared between many popular vehicles of its time.
My wife’s vehicle has far more “creature comforts”. She drives a 2015 Kia Sorento that we bought new. We’re considering upgrading hers to a new Kia Telluride in the near future, especially considering recent trends in used car prices.
There’s definitely still a place out there for mechanically simple vehicles. It’s a shame that the new Jeep Wranglers - say, the JK and newer - have gotten so much larger, more complex, and expensive to maintain.
If I had my druthers, I’d be driving something like a modern Kubelwagen, VW Thing, or perhaps something with a bit more cargo space like a Pinzgauer. It’s a shame no one seems interested in making them.
The problem with Dacia is that it is not just simple but also a cheap car. I would be happy to buy a simple good quality car, but Dacia saves money on plastic quality, noise insulation, engine power and seat comfort too (among others).
On the upside, Dacias are typically larger then other vehicles in the same price range. While you would you be able to buy a small city car from another manufacturer, you could actually buy a Dacia useful for the whole family. Yes, it will be underpowered and noisy, but it will be reliable, cheap to maintain and above all, safe. They get poor safety rating because of the way cars are tested today, but I argue that even a new "less safe" Dacia is safer then a 10 year old "safe" car.
Car companies don't want to sell cheap cars, they want to sell expensive cars. If they made a cheap car that people liked they wouldn't make as much money, so they purposefully make the cheap cars bad in some ways to convince people with extra money to buy more expensive cars while still allowing legitimately poor people to afford a car.
> So yeah, it’s not like offering an affordable bare-bone car isn’t possible in mature markets, it’s more likely that Americans just don’t have an appetite for them.
I do not think it is that simple. I think regulations also restrict how simple a car can be. Top of my head, breaks, lights, light colors, emissions, transmission (go figure), fuel storage, fueling features, and so on. All these add to the cost.
No one wants to drive a car that has no or minimal creature comforts.
> safety features such as lane assist and emergency stop systems become mandatory
I've got a cheap $0 lane assist and emergency stop system called "paying attention and not tailgating" that came stock in my 2003 Ford Ranger. I've been using it consistently for 35 years now on different makes and models of vehicles and it hasn't failed once.
Meanwhile, there are millions of wrecks every year in the US alone. I'm sure a large portion of those drivers said the same until they got hit. You need only browse /r/IdiotsInCars for a few minutes to witness the full range of ways people with the best of intentions can get in wrecks because someone else acted like a fool, and how many could have been prevented with lane keeping and emergency stop features.
The roads are a highly regulated public space where safe, smooth motion depends on everyone working together, and where one little error can throw it into chaos. Everyone will mess up if they live long enough. You can make some philosophical argument against mandatory safety features if you like, but I hate driving as it is and welcome any feature that reduces the odds or severity of the inevitable results of the limits of human perception and reaction time.
In my opinion, the real solution to this isn't to stuff as much driver assistance safety tech into all cars. It's to shift our society to not need cars for basic life necessities.
There are plenty of people who absolutely are not skilled at driving. They never will be. But they have to own a car to live in our society - thus, here we are.
> but I hate driving as it is and welcome any feature that reduces the odds or severity of the inevitable results of the limits of human perception and reaction time.
None of this will change the fact that, you, as the driver bear primary responsibility for your own safety, and that of your passengers, when in control of a vehicle. Driver aids are helpful but are not a substitute for attentive and defensive driving.
Your post reads like you're disagreeing with something I said, but the sentence you quoted isn't in disagreement when considered in context. Maybe you need to re-read the whole thing.
I find the cause for many issues in the US mainly in bad road design. Compare that with France, Germany or The Netherlands. So much better there. lane control hardly needed.
A large part of startup pitches boil down to "what if [thing already done well for decades in Asia and/or Europe], but worse, and expensive?" Ugly patches over the existing horror show might be the only option until there's a major cultural shift.
Our town has been replacing stoplight intersections with roundabouts, and you would think we were trying to castrate all the adult males. How people have any difficulty navigating a roundabout eludes me, but every day I see more drivers just act like they are faced with an alien when they come upon a roundabout.
Are road design in Belgium worse than in the Netherlands? The death rates per mile driven is same as in the US [1].
I don't think "road design" is an issue. People in Europe drive less in general, risk groups (teenagers and elderly) drive significantly less often, there are less people who need a car to get home after a night out, higher BAC levels (0.08% vs 0.05% or less in EU), etc.
So in another conversation we were talking about house and car prices. How there aren't cheap 'starter' options available. Partially due to mandated features and codes.
I feel like in a forum of programmers there would at least be some recognition that "get gud" doesn't scale while lane assist and emergency stop work for everyone all of the time regardless of how tired or distracted the driver is.
You're the next iteration of the person complaining about anti-lock breaks because you can just learn to drive better on ice.
If you want AC and a radio you’re looking at about 12k EUR, which definitely isn’t terrible. It’s a Renault subsidiary and you see a fair amount of them driving around.
So yeah, it’s not like offering an affordable bare-bone car isn’t possible in mature markets, it’s more likely that Americans just don’t have an appetite for them.
The affordable car is definitely being tested though. Renault discontinued the Twingo last year, which was their smallest car. Audi discontinued the A1, claiming there’s just no money to be made in their lowest segment.
It’s looking pretty bleak for the utilitarians among us, as electrification happens and safety features such as lane assist and emergency stop systems become mandatory, base prices will consistently be higher. You can only drive down the price of components so much.