It looks like the car companies have figured out a way to make new vehicles more “affordable”  . . . by charging buyers more for things that used to be standard. For instance, Ford is apparently hitting buyers of the Mach e “Mustang” – which is a five-door electric crossover – with a $495 charge for the frunk that was previously standard. It is something like charing people extra for air in the tires.

Ford is not the only car company doing this, either. Apparently, if you want a storage area in the Dodge Charger EV, you have to fig deep for another $5,000 to get it – because in order to get it, you have to buy a bundled package that is the only way to get it.

This is very common – this “bundling,” I mean. An individual feature you want – such as a sunroof or a better stereo – is bundled with a package that costs thousands to get the one thing you wanted that, by itself, might cost a few hundred.

If you’ve been new car shopping recently, you have probably discovered why most of the new/late model vehicles on the road are white, silver and other drab colors. They charge extra for colors such as red and yellow – and the charge isn’t small. It is typically around $600 – and that explains why most of the new/late model vehicles you see are painted white or silver or some other drab, Soviet-like color.

We are being Sovietized, you see.

Some new EVs do not include a home-charge cord. The VW ID Buzz I test drove last year, for instance. It arrived without the $700 optional home-charge cord, which is something like being expected to pay extra for a fuel-filler door that opens in a vehicle with a gas tank. VW is not the only EV seller that does this, either. I was sent an Acura EV that likewise lacked the extra-cost home-charge cord.

Tesla is infamous – rightly so – for oilily requiring Tesla “owners” (a silly term given the realities) to pay a subscription to be able to continue using the features (such as heated seats and self-driving) they assumed they’d paid for. BMW does the same. There is even a “store” in some of their cars. It is embedded in the LCD touchscreen. You tap to find the “services” you’d like and the system is conveniently tied in to your credit/debit card to deduct the cost.

Who could have imagined that – one not-so-fine day – a new car would be a kind of rolling cash register? One that also cashes in on you, by “monetizing” the “data” it collects about you and selling it off to various parties. You don’t even get a rebate coupon in return. What you do get is personalized/targeted peddling – based on the “data” that was “monetized.”

It is all part of what is styled – accurately – as the extractive economy that replaced the productive marketplace that once existed. The latter was never perfect, to be sure. But it was at least generally predicated on the concept of value-for-value. If you did productive work, you were compensated such that you could afford to buy the things you needed plus some things you just wanted.  Working and middle income people (class is a Marxist term that implies people are stuck in the class they were born into) who worked could afford to buy things such as new cars and were routinely able to own them after just three or maybe four years of making payments. It was not uncommon for some to buy them outright. This as possible when a new car cost less than $15,000 – which was not in the Mad Men era. In the Mad Men era – the early-mid 1960s – you could have bought a new car for $2,000. The era of the $15,000 new car was only about three presidents ago.   

Today, the least expensive new cars cost well over $20,000 and there are only a small handful of them left.

If you manage to buy one, the extractive economy is not done with you. It is just beginning. The insurance mafia will extract proportionately outrageous money from you, because it can force you (effectively) to pay whatever is demanded. If you live in a state that taxes personal property (thereby assaulting the very idea of “property”) you’ll pay a disproportionate sum every year as the extractive price of being allowed to possess the vehicle.

Armed government workers – the so-called “police” – are constantly extracting money from us via a litany of “offenses” that are essentially impossible to avoid being “guilty” of every time one goes for a drive.

And now we’re being extracted at the pump, such that the day is not far off when many of us will be extracted right out of the driver’s seat.

Soon, they’ll probably start charging extra for one of those, too.

. . .

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