Cast your mind back to 2010. You could walk into a Vauxhall dealership and drive away in a brand-new Corsa for under £9,000. Today, that same car starts at nearly £19,000. Wages haven’t doubled. So what on earth happened?
The short answer is: everything went up at once. Steel prices, semiconductor costs, shipping delays, post-pandemic supply shocks. But the longer answer is a bit more uncomfortable, because some of this was a choice.
Manufacturers discovered something useful during the chip shortage of 2021 and 2022: when you build fewer cars, you can charge more for each one. Profit margins on a £30,000 SUV are far fatter than on a £12,000 supermini. So the industry quietly shifted its focus upmarket and never really shifted back.
“The entry-level car has essentially been abandoned by the mainstream brands,” said one independent automotive analyst last year. “There’s simply no financial incentive to build cheap cars in Europe anymore.”
Ford stopped selling the Fiesta in 2023. Volkswagen shelved plans for a budget EV. Renault’s Dacia brand is now one of the last manufacturers genuinely competing at the affordable end, and even its Sandero, which starts around £13,000, isn’t exactly pocket change for a young driver or a family on a tight budget.
Electric vehicles were supposed to democratise motoring. Instead, the average price of a new EV in the UK sits above £40,000. The second-hand market is correcting slowly, but for millions of people, buying new simply isn’t an option anymore.
The consequences are real. First-time buyers are holding onto older, less efficient, more polluting cars for longer. The average age of a vehicle on British roads has crept up to over nine years. Mechanics are busier than ever. Car finance debt is at record levels, with many drivers stretching repayments across six or seven years just to afford something modest.
There’s a certain irony in an industry that spent years talking about mobility for all, now largely building for the comfortable middle and above.
The question worth asking isn’t just how we got here. It’s whether anyone in Westminster or Brussels is actually paying attention, and whether the political will exists to do anything about it before affordable motoring becomes a memory rather than a right.
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