It's complicated.

As someone who got to see this from the inside:

1. When constructing a car, one of the key components is the wiring harness that bundles together all the wiring for the vehicle.

Surprisingly most wiring harnesses used to come from Ukraine of all places. So when Russia invaded Ukraine, that completely disrupted the wiring harness supply.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ukraine-invasion-hurts-flow-wire-harnesses-carmakers-2022-03-02/

To work around that, manufacturers had to come up with either new, stable suppliers or invest in their own production lines.

2. Covid. As mentioned in the article, but there were multiple impacts on that. For example, it made it incredibly difficult to do lease returns. If people leasing their cars can't return them, then they can't get into new vehicles. Similar, re-sellers of lease returns and fleet vehicles have no stock because nobody is returning their lease.

https://www.carscoops.com/2024/07/dealers-brace-for-the-next-pandemic-related-supply-issue-fewer-lease-returns/

3. Tariffs. Also as noted in the article.

They elude to it in the second line after the title but they never point it out:

Five years ago it was a lot easier to buy a car for less than $30,000.

...and later in the article....

New cars costing less than $30,000 were just 13.9 percent of all car sales in the first half of this year; for the first six months of 2019—before the pandemic drove up new car prices by so much—they made up 38 percent of new car sales.

I think the answer is simply inflation:

$30,000 in 2019 is worth $37,722.15 today

...and...

$24,000 in 2019 is worth $30,177.72 today

So for apples to apples comparison the question should be, "How many fewer cars costing $24,000 in 2019 are there that cost $30,000 today?", but the article doesn't ask or answer that question.

Tariffs are new.

They will push average prices even higher but the average new car price has been around 40k for a few years now.

Keep your classic cars roadworthy and registered.

Legislative changes and requirements for useless and dangerous Advanced Driver Assistance Systems are making it more difficult to keep older cars on the road.

Until you need to buy a parts, I’m rebuilding a truck and watching the prices go up

All the tech bullshit is obvious.

When you make a product and keep improving it, at some point you reach max level product and then what? People won't buy your new car if it doesn't have something amazing new that the competition has too, so you'll just start making bullshit features.

Then you figure out that with software you can sell the car AND charge a monthly subscription fee, so you can squeeze your golden goose customer even more

All this was inevitable since decades ago

capitalism. it’s capitalism.

The article doesn't really mention it, but it's also partly due to the OEMs cancelling a lot of new programs over the last year. Running existing equipment, which has already paid itself off, for a few extra years leads to slightly cheaper vehicles.

Everyone (who doesn’t have waist-down body issues) does too, but car manufacturers can’t charge as much for them.

They therefore lobby governments for tax breaks for the oversized road boats and destroy the market for Japanese kei-cars with tariffs and “safety regulations”.

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/big-ute-loophole-cost-taxpayers-over-250-million-in-2023/

https://www.drive.com.au/news/imported-kei-cars-stranded-australia-blunder/

As someone who drives a 2002 sedan, it is amazing to me how large all cars have become. The only comparably sized thing from my car’s era to today’s vehicles were Hummers, which were literally regarded as an insanely oversized monstrosity at the time.

If you see a 2002 hummer next to most any modern SUV, the modern SUV is dwarfing the Hummer the way that a hummer dwarfs my little car. Its ridiculous.

Now, many of those modern monstrosities are probably getting better milage than my 02’ sedan, but imagine what insanely fuel efficient cars we could make today if modern sedans werent the size of a 2002 era station wagon? Imagine how much better our roads would be if the average passenger vehicle didnt weigh well over 4k pounds…

The modern Hummer EV weighs like 10k pounds. Why the fuck are people allowed to drive a 5-ton vehicle without a special license?

Used to be true, not consistently so since COVID or so. I had to buy a car about two years ago and brand new cars with full warranties were only $1-2k more and with better financing offers than 2-4 year used cars with limited warranties. It got better for a bit but apparently used car prices are spiking again