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.
Absolutely, I think there’s an argument to be made for that too. Increased automation doesn’t necessarily increase safety when the skill of doing the task without the automation is lost. For example, hand flying planes has become a struggle for airline pilots that some argue have become overly reliant on automation to the point of it being a detriment to safety when something goes wrong and they can no longer handle an emergency situation without the automation being available to them.