The industry has changed massively in the last couple of years alone not to mention dieselgate etc.
From what I have been reading manufactures have been massively underpricing their cars to drive out competition. 30-40 years ago a car was a piece of tin with 4 wheel and an engine bolted on so building them was stupidly cheap. Now with all the technology that they put in, that’s required for safety and in car entertainment. All these systems linking together and the introduction of all the self driving technologies, cars are massively expensive to make and just the R&D alone runs into multi billions of $ for each new model.
Now with electric cars it’s giving them a chance to redress the imbalance and all new electric cars are much more expensive despite the costs of batteries coming down. Realistically the batteries aren’t anywhere near as expensive as the cars cost but the manufacturers are using that money to push new r&d, this is where manufacturers like fiat have fallen down they’ve spent so many years selling “cheap cars” they’ve not put any money away for a rainy day, now they have no ability to react like they need to.
I think with cars the chip shortage is a bit of an excuse, if you want a car you can get it, it’s not like these cars are not available. Many of the chip shortages relate to the very modern and advanced chips from graphics cards, phones, tablets and computer manufacturers the very latest advances.
Covid has also added to the problem and there are massive shifts in things once “cheap” are now getting expensive as companies look to regain their losses over Covid.
In short car prices are never going back down like they have been in the past, even a fairly mundane Fiat 500 is now topping in at £18 - 20k
