Inflation has been a subject on everyone’s lips in 2024, not least with regards to new car prices, which we were recently told had risen 129% over the past 15 years. Goodness gracious!
Now, with the few gaps in Autocar’s digital archive having been filled, the possibility of taking a long-term view is intriguing.
Working out an average price of the cars featuring in our weekly road test (which admittedly is probably skewed towards the higher end of the market) since World War II reveals that car prices remained fairly flat until the 1980s, when they suddenly soared and have since maintained that trajectory.
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Of course, that the average road test subject cost £1016 in 1950 doesn’t tell us much, because it seems an absurdly small amount of money today.
Unless you can remember life back then, you have no concept of how much that sum was actually worth. So let’s adjust that £1016 for historical inflation, giving us an equivalent in modern money.
That’s £28,781, the Bank of England’s calculator tells us. Wow: it seems remarkably cheap, considering that the average road test subject in 2022 was £70,054.
Or, to put it another way, a Jowett Jupiter roadster in 1950 cost essentially the same as a Mazda MX-5 does today – which might seem reasonable to you.
Yet anyone who was around in the 1950s will tell you that the Jupiter was hardly an affordable option for most people.
My own grandmother recalls that when she was a child, merely the distant sound of an engine signalled that her stepfather was arriving home from work, because his Austin A90 was the only car that lived on their south London street.
So, not only did her neighbours not each own a Morris Minor Tourer (the cheapest car we tested in 1950), despite one costing the equivalent of only £11,080 in today’s money (actually £2715 less than the cheapest car of today, the Dacia Sandero), but also someone as affluent as a surgery-owning dentist would proudly have been able to own a Nissan Qashqai equivalent.
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The supply of new cars was also severely restricted as well in the early 1950's, due to most of them going abroad because of the British government's export or die mantra. So a long wait was usual before the new car was delivered and by the time it arrived the rate of purchase tax on it could well have increased ,as this was HM Treasury's preferred method of controlling the economy in those days.