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The safety features are worth millions of crashes prevented and thousands of lives saved, making them remarkably cost-effective.
Capping the luxury features and size of passenger vehicles would do a lot more to bring down costs than removing safety features.
Wage increases have outpaced inflation every year since 2020 (first year I checked) except 2022. MSRP has not changed significantly for compact cars, adjusted for inflation. MSRP has actually dropped for all vehicles in the last year (at least). This means that compact cars have actually become cheaper, at least by a small amount.
The people complaining about affordability aren’t buying these cars.