Vehicles under $15k are 1.6% of the market, and their share of the market has dropped over 90% since 2019. The old advice that you can get a beater and drive it in to the ground for $5k hasn’t been true for years but it still seems pervasive in personal finance spaces.
Cash for clunkers and other programs killed the used market.
That ended 14 years ago.
The car companies just moved up market, nobody cares about affordable cars.
Then inflation didn’t help.
How old do you think the $5k cars would be if they were on the market?
This is not true, the used market was still great pre-covid. COVID obliterated new vehicle pricing and availability, and naturally the used market followed