Particularly by Jaguar. rimshot
My mechanic knows my head can be turned by the siren call of the products of Sir William of Coventry and recommends against them. “Great, Mark, so how about your FIL’s Benz 280SL?”
“No, that’s mine. When my MIL gets rid of another Crown Vic you can buy it. You liked her old one so much.”
Oldest daughter has taken to calling him Uncle Mark because he’s more useful than her real Uncles Mark.
Landrover went through the process you describe. When I was a kid they were an unheard-of ridiculous luxury product. Then they went through a mass-production phase when they seemed to be everywhere. Likewise “Hummer” the which I haven’t seen in I don’t know how long.
Mercedes has some relatively inexpensive models now, and there are lower-end Jaguars now too. I give Mercedes credit because they were always said to be expensive because they last so long.
But while BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, and the higher-end Cadillacs were all middle-class aspirations, in my lifetime none have been beyond the upper-middle to obtain.
In 1980 the base price of a Mercedes 240D was $18,761. The median household income in 1980 was $15,944. So a base Mercedes cost you roughly 14 months’ salary. I’d call that “aspirational.”
General Motors built its post-WW2 dominance by stair-stepping its divisions so a buyer could buy progressively more expensive cars as their income grew. Chevrolet and Pontiac were entry-level models for blue-collar families, Oldsmobile was for up-and-coming middle-class suburbanites, Buicks were for doctors, lawyers, and bankers (luxurious, but not too flashy so you wouldn’t be seen as too rich for your clients) and Cadillacs were for the wealthy.
Base price of a Chevrolet Bel-Air in 1955 - $2,031
Base price of a Buick Special in 1955 - $2,876
Base price of a Cadillac Series 55 in 1955 - $3,882
Median household income in 1955 was $4,418, so even the $845 jump from the Chevrolet to the Buick was almost 20% of the average family’s income.
But note that even a Cadillac would only cost a little under 11 months of a family’s income, which is still a lot less than than a Mercedes 25 years later.
Thats probably just nostalgia. Cars today are much longer lasting from the people I’ve heard who drove in the 70s. I’d be shocked if cars in the past were more reliable.
Having said that, my brother once bought a Jeep CJ-7. if you looked under the hood there was tons of free space there because there wasn’t a lot of mechanical equipment. So maybe it possible for less things to go wrong due to that, but again I’ve heard many people say back in the older days you had to do multiple major repairs before you got to 100k. And back then many cars rolled over the odometer at 100k anyway since cars didn’t last that long.
Was there ever a time? Of course there was. My lower middle class family didn’t have a car at all until late 1953, my senior year in HS. During the 40s, we kids could play on the street since most of the inhabitants didn’t have cars and traffic on the small streets in my west Philadelphia neighborhood was rare. In those days, imports were unknown (VW bugs started coming in in numbers in the late 50s) and the luxury cars were the Caddies and Lincolns. And only wealthy people bought them.
By the way, it is absolutely clear that cars didn’t last nearly as long in those bygone days and don’t let anyone tell you differently. Of course, cars these days are much more complicated (my father claimed that in the 30s he could take a car apart–and put it back together–with a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench. By the 50s this was probably not true.
Short answer: no. Not for the brands you’re mentioning. When I managed a Domino’s Pizza in the early 80s, I had people delivering in BMWs and Audis. Later that decade my brother talked me out of buying a used early 944 which was only $10k - I’d paid more for my 1985 Honda Prelude.
There’s always been a healthy market for used mid-range luxury vehicles. The big change was leasing, which meant the used market was flooded with them.
on Jaguar the joke is why are there no British computers? Because they can’t make them leak oil like British cars.
You know why the British drink their beer warm? Lucas makes their refrigerators.
I have heard it said that there are three classic oxymorons.
Keep in mind, OP, that a lot of these brands that we think of as luxury brands started out by importing turds. Sure a 240D would run forever, but for all the money you spent on it you’d get vinyl seats, crank windows, and a slow, noisy engine. That same $18,761 could get you a very nice 1980 Cadillac Eldorado loaded with luxury features and a smooth ride.
What you were paying for, then, was exclusivity. You’d have the only 240D on the block, and it came with a certain cachet. And exclusivity is really the definition of luxury, since features that were considered “luxurious” in 1980 are now standard equipment on even the cheapest cars.
A few things have happened since 1980. German automakers have produced downmarket models (a C-class does not have the same cachet as a 1980 240D, plus it starts like $25k less after adjusting for inflation), they started producing cars in America to bring the costs down, and standard equipment rose across the board. So now a “luxury” Mercedes with lots of nice features is accessible, whereas in 1980 it wasn’t.
So to answer your question, you have to look elsewhere. The cheapest Teslas leaving the showroom cost about the same as that 1980 240D, so anyone you see driving a Model 3 or better is probably in about the same place financially that Mercedes buyers were back then. And I think $55k Teslas are out of reach for most people, 7 year loans included. That’s just a lot of money for a new car.
If you had a car in the '60s or '70s you were very lucky to get 100,000 miles out of the engine before it blew something, started to consume oil, etc. IF you got that many miles out of the engine, it was definitely ready for a complete engine rebuild. The tolerances that an engine could be built with were much sloppier, the technology to build a better engine was just not there yet. The rings, pistons, engine block, would just wear down and you need to re-bore the engine block to a larger size, new rings, pistons, crank shaft, bearings, then you could get another short life out of the engine while the rest of the car wore out.
As for the affordability of luxury cars for the average person, the relatively short life span of cars in those days meant that you were not going to get financing to pay for them like you can now. The reason that you can get a 7 year car loan now is because the vehicle will last that long and still have resale value.
For a lot of the luxury cars, if you can only just afford the car payment, you can’t afford the car. Those cars typically have maintenance costs that are sky-high. Something like a routine brake job will be thousands of dollars. In addition, the performance capabilities of those cars come from a lot of fragile parts, so there’s a lot more things to break and will be very costly to fix. The ongoing costs can’t be rolled into your car loan, so you’re going to be stuck paying them out of pocket. The warranty isn’t going to last the duration of a 7+ year car loan.
If you mean literally “most,” then sure, it’s out of reach. But affording a $55,000 Tesla isn’t much different than affording a $55,000 F-150 or $55,000 Expedition or $55,000 Silverado. There are enough people buying them that it keeps Ford and GM healthy.
I recently saw that the Model 3 was the best selling luxury car. Really? A C-sized car is a luxury car? What makes it a luxury car? Exclusivity? While the price is in reach, the waiting list for any Tesla product has made them quite exclusive.
I think $55k vehicles are out of reach for most people regardless of if they’re a Tesla or an E-class or a high end F150. That’s $1,100 a month on a 5 year loan, plus insurance. The internet wisdom is to spend no more than 10% of your gross income on a car payment, and by that metric only the top 10% of earners should even consider one. Is that exclusive enough to be called a luxury car? I guess that’s up for debate but it’s a much higher bar than leasing a C-class.