Let’s see. I was buying beaters from junkyards back in the 80s. You’ll notice I said beaters,plural. They weren’t decent, not unless you consider a brown car with one green door and a lot of dents “decent”. Only one of them ( the one that lasted a couple of months) was $100. The others ( there were 3 more that I paid for ) cost anywhere between $250 and $500
True, my first vehicle was a '65 Ford F-100, that needed brake work (less than $35 in parts to fix those, another $35 for an engine mount, and about $25 to add seat belts). Bought for $200. Worked fine for the year and some change that I drove it before I rolled it (my fault, not a failure on its part).
It would probably still be trucking along if I hadn’t rolled it. That 300 ci six was pretty indestructible. But it still was about 3x $100.
I don’t think it necessarily has to be high end to be a luxury nor does a luxury have to be high end. If I had two cars now it would be a luxury - but it wasn’t while we were both working. My son has a 2013 Honda CRV - he paid $13K for it. Still a luxury because he hardly ever drives it - he lives in Manhattan and parks it near my house so he only takes it when he wants to go on a weekend trip or to the warehouse store.
A car (or a truck) is a necessity for most people, most places. That’s why I was pondering calling it a “luxury”. They might have luxury prices now, but that’s something altogether different.
Right- and I’m saying the price really doesn’t have much to do with whether it’s a luxury or not. It’s the circumstances.
Plastic don’t rust. 
I remember when I was shopping for my last new car, my mechanic warned me, “Be careful what you choose. This will probably be the second-last car you ever buy, so you’ll want to keep it a long time.”
That was in 2014. The car now had 80,000 miles on it, and the way my wife and I are going it will very likely be the last car we ever bought.
Maybe it is an affordable luxury because of artificially low fuel/energy prices. I will bet you are not paying $15/gallon. Yet.
There’s a sense in which using a personal car or truck can be said to have a “luxury” aspect irrespective of what it costs. Namely, for most drivers, there’s a substantial proportion of trips where the potential capacity/performance of the vehicle is wildly disproportionate to the more limited requirements of what it’s actually being used for.
E.g., it’s intrinsically, functionally wasteful for an able-bodied individual to drag along about 1500 kg and 12 cubic meters of climate-controlled, multi-passenger, high-speed-enabled vehicle with substantial cargo capacity just to transport their own body (and maybe an easily portable bag) a couple-few kilometers in a physically tolerable environment.
Nonetheless, that wasteful setup is some combination of culturally-mandated and logistically-necessary for millions of Americans every day of their lives. Either they don’t have workable mass transit alternatives, and/or they’re not physically capable of (or don’t have safe roadways for) micromobility transit modes like walking or bicycling, and/or their schedules are tight enough that they can’t spare an extra half-hour or so a day for transportation, and/or if they have to own the car anyway for other purposes then there’s no point spending extra to use a different transit mode for short trips, etc. Or they’ve just never seriously thought at all about possible strategies for getting around without owning a car.
Consequently, dragging a whole entire car along with you whenever you need to go anywhere (and maybe even having to pay to park it once you get there) certainly doesn’t feel luxurious to most drivers. But when you stop to think about it, there’s no question that a certain amount of functional extravagance is built in to the American commitment to the private motor vehicle for the overwhelming majority of our transportation. If constantly using far more resources than a task physically requires counts as “luxury”, then most privately owned cars in the US qualify.
Maybe my title was a bit too abbreviated, but I did narrow the definition in the OP:
owning a reliable, well-maintained and well-repaired vehicle is becoming a luxury.
The idea that there are fewer reliable and well-maintained cars on the road (which is what you’d see if they were becoming a luxury) doesn’t pass a sniff test to me (maybe if you used a really recent baseline for comparison, like 2019 or something), but thankfully there are lots of statistics about this kind of thing.
I’ll look at the poorest fifth of households, since that’s surely where this would have the biggest impact.
In 1999, households in the lowest quintile of income spent 16.7% of their household expenditures on transportation, and 8.7% of transportation expenditures (so 1.5% of all expenditures) were on maintenance and repairs. These households had, on average, 1.0 vehicles per household, and 34% of them had no car.
In 2024, the most recent year that’s available, transportation as a share of household expenditure was down slightly to 14.6% in the lowest quintile, and maintenance was also down a bit as a share of transportation expenditures to 7.7% (1.1% of all expenditures). They still had 1.0 vehicles per household, with 32% having no car.
So, the poorest fifth of households are just about as likely to have a car as they were a quarter of a century earlier, and they’re using a slightly smaller share of their outgoings on keeping their cars running.
I remember a John Oliver feature years back about predatory used car loans. One of the key takeaways is that people will neglect most bills before they miss a car payment, because without the car they often can’t work. This lets the loan companies squeeze a maximum amount of profit from their victims before the inevitable repossession and resale of the vehicle.
Oftentimes, the option to not own a car is the luxury, and the memory of the cheap beater that gets you where you need to go is more akin to Sam’s boots than sound economic planning.
Anyway, the cheap beater of the modern era is the ebike/scooter. Unsafe, impractical for long distance, shotty in shitty weather, but orders of magnitude more affordable than even a used car.
I certainly consider myself to be in that category. My wife and I own what some would consider a luxury brand of cars. Both mid-00s. Very low mileage. Both garage queens that I’ve maintained obsessively to factory standards, with a few small exceptions like switching over to LED head and tail lights, updated low dust break pads.
What keeps me up at night is not reliability, nor any kind of envy for newer tech (I hate the touchscreen bullshit in new cars), but availability of replacement part if/when I do need to repair something. For instance, my radiator cooling fan decided to pack it in and I could not find a factory OEM unit. The one I got is irritatingly loud when it switches into high speed in particularly hot conditions, so I’m waiting for my specialist shop to source a new original part.
I’m in the market for a third (arguably totally unnecessary) vehicle. Waiting for the right one to come along with low miles and good provenance. It too will be an older car, specifically the last of its particular model run (2013). I just want it. So yeah, a luxury item.
My fellow tech in our department is 26 and has never owned a car. In fact, he has yet to even get a license. The data guy is 28, and he just purchased a 2009 Prius because of money issues. Heck, that’s a 17 year old car. Money, of course is the issue. Expensive cars, expensive gas, expensive maintenance, etc makes it economically challenging.
Even learning to drive can be a prohibitive expense if you didn’t receive instruction for free from your parents or school. (Especially since one can’t very well practice on one’s own between lessons.)
Yes, but cars are not merely about getting from point A to point B for people. For a certain subset of the population, the more unnecessarily wasteful your car, the higher your status is presumed to be. These vehicles are not only wasteful but they are more dangerous for pedestrians and other road vehicles.
There are also people for whom the more economical your car, the higher your status is presumed to be. While it’s silly, I can’t really see any significant drawbacks.
I used to drive a Honda Fit which cost $19k brand new in 2009. I loved it, and I loved that I got 45-50mpg. It was perfect for navigating Philadelphia traffic when I went to graduate school.
I had to let it go in 2019 when I got pregnant with my son, because I couldn’t tolerate the risk of my child getting in a collision with one of those behemoths. I traded it in for a used 2016 CRV which IIRC was $26k (my friends immediately dubbed it the “Mom-Mobile.”) It felt comparatively huge at first but it turned out to be exactly the right amount of space for a family of three. But I don’t love it like I did the Fit. It only gets 25mpg and it’s harder to maneuver (I do love those heated seats, though.) Also, it has less hauling space than the Fit did!
There is no way we could survive without a car, and that is the case with millions of Americans. But not everyone needs a Hummer or giant Ford truck or whatever. And those people are making it less safe to own cheap, fuel efficient vehicles.
Personal transportation is a great thing. Henry Ford might have been an asshole in a lot of ways, but he revolutionized transportation. It makes a reasonably comfortable existence for millions possible in the first place. Horses were replaced for very good reasons. I’ve pondered this many times, we can travel in minutes or hours that sometimes took days. From out here in the cheap seats, the rabid animus towards coal, gas, and oil looks like something Pol Pot would have favored. It’s insane, frankly.
Moderating:
The rest of your post is fine. But this part veers into insulting other posters. This is IMHO. You know where the pit is
A BIG change was we saved a lot of money by working on our own cars.
Our cars are paid off. We are retired, but we need two.
Sure, but none of that benefit intrinsically requires using a multi-passenger, individually operated powered vehicle for every trip.
A bicycle is faster and easier to operate over medium distances than a horse, and orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to park and maintain. An express bus is about as fast as, and way more efficient and cost-effective than, multiple individually-owned cars when it comes to transporting groups of passengers from point A to point B over a given route. Subways and other mass-transit vehicles are way better at moving people through dense urban spaces than space-wasting individual cars. And so on and so on.
The issue isn’t that modern humans don’t have any alternative to universal individual car ownership other than going back to horse-drawn transit. The issue is that when modern humans want or expect one transportation mode that will handle all their transportation needs, what they end up with is the individually owned and operated, multi-passenger, powered vehicle. Even though, as I said, such a vehicle is indisputably quite wasteful for a lot of the trip requirements it’s actually used for.
(And no, this is not at all about any kind of “rabid animus” toward fossil fuels that you inexplicably devolved into snarling about. The intrinsic wastefulness of the individually owned and operated, multi-passenger, powered vehicle in many transportation contexts has basically nothing at all to do with what kind of fuel is powering it.
Even if your (generic “you”) five-passenger car is a zero-emissions marvel running on kindly sunbeams captured by negative-carbon solar panels that were handcrafted from sustainably harvested woodland fairy wings or whatever, it’s still intrinsically wasteful to drag it around with you on trips where you only need to transport your able-bodied self. It’s additional weight and unnecessary wear and tear on the roadways, it’s additional footprint requiring unnecessary space hogged by parking areas, it’s additional energy used for climate-controlling a far larger interior space than you personally need.
That’s just basic physics. Individuals driving cars are very often hauling around vast quantities of excess weight and empty space that’s serving no purpose for that particular trip. But as I said, that’s the downside they’re stuck with if they want to have a single transportation mode that will also handle trips where the extra weight and space do come in handy. Consequently, most US drivers have got so fixed in the mindset that their individual car is simply “how to get anywhere outdoors” that they don’t even notice how physically wasteful its fundamental structure is for a large proportion of the trips where they use it.)