Are affordable cars getting less media coverage?

Maybe it’s the increasingly less equal distribution of income and wealth. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s not even happening. But my sense has been that cars few people can afford have been receiving an increasingly large slice of the automotive press coverage.

In the August 2013 Car & Driver, Ed reacts to the “many readers [who] wrote in to voice their discontent with the high prices of the vehicles in the May issue,” conceding that “we attempt to cover a sampling of all vehicle segments…but we devoted a few extra pages to pricey fantasy cars.” An attendant graph has the segments and their share:

Less than $50,000: 30%

$50,000-$99,999: 16%

$100,000-$199,999: 35%

$200,000 and Up: 19%

What I find most interesting about these segments: the first one goes all the way up to $50,000–a figure well beyond the median price of a new vehicle. Few people can afford even a $50,000 car. For them, even the next-lowest segment is fantasy.

What’s behind this split? One factor is that there are simply more models and special variants of models to cover in the high-level segments. If a car is over $50,000, it’s much more likely to make business sense to have a variant of it (a different engine, suspension, and/or body style) that will only sell a few thousand units (if that). Part of that business case: a lavish press junket guaranteed to result in press coverage. Not necessarily positive coverage, but coverage, which is a benefit in and of itself. Someone interested in a road test of an all-new economy car might have to wait months for it to show up. But the latest twist on the same car from Bentley?