#AffordableCars

Mitsubishi recently announced that it would discontinue the Mirage, removing one of America’s few remaining affordable new cars. Kia is now cutting another sub-$20,000 option with its announcement of the Rio’s demise after 2023.

Before we get to this list of “best cheap cars”, I feel like you might be wondering about that headline. Why $22,515? I chose that number because the average price of a new car in 2021 has crept past $45,000 for the first time — $45,301, to be exact — and half of that is … well, you get the idea.

As for the list, I’ll try to answer it the same way you’d probably answer your friends if they asked you for help picking a new car: With a question of my own.

“What do you plan on using it for?”

Buy/Drive/Burn returns today with another “cheapest of” installment, the latest in a series that’s seen us cover sedans, midsize trucks, and most recently some convertibles.

And today we’re discussing the cheapest full-size trucks on offer in 2021.

We closed out last week with a Buy/Drive/Burn entry that covered the three cheapest sedans available in America this year. Nearly all of you decided you’d buy the most expensive of the three, the Hyundai Accent.

Today’s trio are the least expensive trucks on sale today with plain paint, two driven wheels, and steelies. Think you’ll select the most expensive truck of today’s trio for the Buy? Let’s find out.

We’ve finally made it to the top. Today marks the last entry in the QOTD sedan series, in which we discuss the few options available to the large luxury sedan buyer in 2020.

Pick a best all-rounder, even if you can’t afford it.

Unpopular sedan offerings are getting the axe across the board this year, prompting a QOTD series about the best offerings in each size class. We’ve previously discussed compact and midsize offerings, and we round out the end of 2019 with everyone’s favorite: large sedans.

Many sedans are due to fade away at the end of this year, replaced via a cadre of crossovers (as preferred by Middle America). To that end, we began a trio of sedan-focused QOTDs last week. First up were the compact and subcompact sedans, where your author awarded the Mazda 3 a class win.

This week, we’re talking midsizers. The choices are fewer in number than you might think.

As 2019 draws to a close, the future of the sedan has never looked dimmer. A number of sedans die with the current model year, with the majority of funerals happening at American brands. For now, let’s pick out some bright spots in our sedan offerings before the herd is thinned considerably in 2020.

Up first this week are the small sedans.

It’s called “optimism bias”, and for a while it fell into the realm of what people like to call “settled science.” Supposedly, humans are “hard-wired” to be more optimistic in any given situation than a realistic appraisal of the circumstances would justify.

This is why people buy lottery tickets, which are statistically equivalent to toilet paper. It’s why I continue to ride a BMX bike at skateparks even though I’m far more likely to endure yet another painful injury than I am to perform anything like a respectable stunt. It’s why people respond to “casual encounters — w4m” ads on Craiglist even though forty-nine out of fifty ads are utterly fraudulent attempts to steal anything from your wallet to your personal data to your kidneys.

But wait, there’s more. A new study suggests that optimism bias is more an artifact of bad experiment design than a reflection of actual human predisposition. Who’s right and who is wrong? I’m optimistic that we will eventually know the truth. In the meantime, let’s consider a question that verges on the outrageously hopeful…

They say that Donald Trump is Literally Hitler. That he is the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. That he believes all the things that Hitler believed. That his plan to restrict illegal immigration is literally equivalent to killing six million people. He says he can build a peaceful relationship with Russia instead of having an awesome progressive war over Syria. Guess what? HITLER ALSO BUILT A PEACEFUL RELATIONSHIP WITH RUSSIA. Before attacking Russia. It’s true. Look in an old racist history book and you can see that Hitler made peace with Russia in nineteen-something, right before he sent Messerschmitt Bf109s to attack peaceful villagers in Mexico, or Spain, or whatever.

Alright, so all of that might be a bit exaggerated, although if you’re one of the participation-trophy Millennials who is currently milling about a Starbucks in an attempt to overturn a democratic election, you probably don’t believe in that.

But what if it had been true? What if Donald J. Trump wasn’t just a businessman, hustler, and television personality who managed to elevate himself to the Presidency mostly on his own dime despite being stabbed in the back by everybody from CNN to Paul Ryan, but instead he was literally Hitler?

Well, if you’re a student of pre-war German history like I was as a child, you know that he would immediately insist on a few things: a revival of traditional culture, full employment, and … wait for it … a People’s Car.

What would that look like? What would the American Folks-Wagon be?