Someone finally said "appliance car" out loud in the automotive press, and I almost spit out my coffee. Not because it was a bad idea. Because I've been saying it for years, and nobody wanted to hear it.
My version was slightly more whimsical. I used to joke that the Toyota Corolla is a refrigerator. Not an insult — a compliment. Grandma's refrigerator. The one humming in the corner of a 1962 kitchen that's still making ice in 2024. Reliable not because it was engineered with planned longevity in mind, but because it was engineered to work and nothing more. No OS. No processor. No monthly subscription to unlock the crisper drawer.
A Jerry Hirsch column in Automotive News put it plainly this week: the auto industry needs an appliance car to solve its affordability crisis. The numbers make the case without much help. The average RAV4 now stickers at $41,598 — up 25% since 2021. Total cost of ownership runs about $1,000 a month when you stack insurance, fuel, and maintenance on top of the payment. Sounds more like a second mortgage instead of a transportation budget.
His solution: smaller cars, good fuel economy, mandatory safety tech, and skip the rest. No embedded infotainment beyond CarPlay and Android Auto. Let people bring their own phone. Radical, apparently.
I agree with the diagnosis. I have some concerns about the cure.
Here's the thing about government-supported appliance cars. We already had one. I saw them with my own eyes.
When I spent time in Romania, you'd still spot the occasional oil-smoke-farting Trabant. Its weird plastic body shaking around the cobbled streets. East Germany's answer to the people's mobility question. Commissioned by the state, designed by committee, built to a price point that the commissars had already decided was the right one. It was the original appliance car. It got you from here to there. You had no real choice in the matter, and that was more or less the point.
The Trabant wasn't born from the market asking for something affordable. It was born from a government deciding what affordable transportation would look like and then building it accordingly. The consumer was downstream of that decision, not upstream of it.
Sound familiar?
Now let's talk about the Volkswagen ID. Unyx 09, which VW Group just unveiled for the Chinese market. I'll warn you: the name alone is enough to make you question your life choices. But here's how they described it:
"Advanced L2 driving assistance, high-performance computing, and an intuitive AI assistant... enabled by Xpeng's Turing AI chips, which boast up to three times the computing power of current industry standards. The Turing AI chip features a 40-core processor, dual Neural Processing Units, and a neural network-optimized architecture tailored for end-to-end large models, making it ideal for AI-defined vehicles, robots and flying cars."
Robots and flying cars. They put that in a car press release. For a sedan.
This is the new affordability car. Government-subsidized EV infrastructure, mandated adoption timelines, and EV skateboard vehicles increasingly described the way we used to describe iPhones in 2011. Fastest chip. Best neural network. Seamless integration. The monthly subscription to unlock the left turn signal. You have to pay more for the right turn signal. The AI assistant that's always listening because — well, that's how it works now.
Remember the PC MHz wars? Every year a new chip, a new benchmark, a new reason your current machine felt slow even though it wasn't. The hardware arms race that ended in landfills full of perfectly functional computers made artificially obsolete by software bloat and ecosystem lock-in. We're about to run that same play with a two-ton vehicle that you financed for 72 months.
I'm not anti-technology. I'm anti-theater.
There's a version of the appliance car that's genuinely useful: lighter, simpler, priced for the buyer the industry has been steadily pricing out. It's called the Toyota Corolla circa 2019. A car that works the way grandma's refrigerator works. Turn the key, it runs, and nobody at headquarters can toggle a feature off because you missed a payment.
What's being sold as that car — particularly through the EV mandates and the tech stack arms race — is something else. It's a tracking device with a powertrain, dressed up as personalization. It's the Trabant with better marketing and a chip that can supposedly run a flying car.
Here's what I've been saying for about ten years, and nobody wanted to hear that one either.
The EV box pulls up. You step in. "Hello, Steve." It's synced to your phone, your watch, or — give it a few years — whatever they've put in your wrist. Before you've buckled, the seat, the temperature, the lighting, the music are all set. Yours. Personalized. Seamless. It's genuinely impressive, right up until you ask where it's taking you.
Because if it's a Saturday, and the people with the V8s and the V10s and the V12s are down at Corona del Mar, and they'd prefer not to have the traffic — well. That's their beach. The box knows. It'll find you something appropriate. Walmart, probably. And you'll be grateful for the smooth ride.
That's not a conspiracy theory. That's a feature roadmap.
The Trabant worked, incidentally. It got people where they needed to go. But nobody who drove one would tell you they had any real say in the matter.
That's the law of unintended consequences at work, and it has an annoyingly good track record.
The appliance car is a good idea. Just make sure you know who's building the appliance, and who gets to decide when it stops working.
Photo: Freysteinn G. Jonsson / Unsplash
Inspired by Jerry Hirsch's column in Automotive News, April 22, 2026: "An appliance car is the answer to the vehicle affordability crisis."
