The Car Got Better. The Deal Got Worse.
12th August 2026
Right up top, I must admit that I am a huge car guy. I love old cars. I want to feel connected to the machine. I miss rowing through the gears on a manual transmission. In that sense, modern cars are unequivocally worse than their older counterparts.
So I went into this expecting to write an article bashing the industry about the myriad ways that cars themselves had gotten worse. I figured I’d find that components had gotten flimsier. That vehicles now don’t last as long as they used to. But after looking at the data, that just simply isn’t true. By almost every measure, the new car in your driveway is better than any equivalent in history.
A lot did get worse. Just not the car itself.