There's huge inflation in many things related to making cars (chips, steel, shipping costs as many cars are still being shipped across the ocean, labor costs, etc.). We are likely to be in the very beginning of significant inflation cycle, with probably double digit inflation which will eventually drop to 4-4.5%. I wouldn't expect to prices to drop any time soon, nor have 2% inflation. My bet is that fewer and fewer new cars will be sold in the next few years (3-5) with prices rising 4-10% each year.

It's not just cars, the prices are rising across the board (not evenly), so we have pretty high inflation if you add in the items official estimates excluded.

This is mostly just a reflection of the fact that the value of the dollar has declined precipitously over the last 18 months. Dollar prices are sticky, so it can take a bit of a shock for inflation to “kick in”, but we’ve had plenty of shocks to go around.

I don't think it's fair to attribute "most" of this to inflation. Car prices have been rising much faster than many other components of CPI, so even in real rather than nominal dollars cars are getting more expensive.

The stuff people actually care about has been rising faster than CPI. Cars, housing, meat, metals, lumber, etc. are all going through the roof. Inflation is a vector, and any reduction to a scalar involves taking the dot product of that vector with a weight vector. Under my personal weight vector, and I suspect most people’s weight vector, inflation is a lot higher than CPI.

Food prices are insane right now. I used to leave the grocery store with a spend of ~$90 now I average ~$120. Its anecdotal but it adds up.

I'll add a bit of a pedantic point: the dollar hasn't really lost any value _against other currencies_ (DXY) over the past year. In fact, it is a little higher.

It has lost value against lots of commodities and "real" goods.

When do we get 30 year loans to buy a car?