1928 Seven - or a new Dacia?

[Tony Griffiths]

In the picture below, it's September 1928 and the family man earns £300 a year or - in today's money, £19,000. As the average annual wage in January 2020 was £26,624, could a man today (with a wife at home and children) afford a similar new car?
At £125, in 1928, the cost of a Seven was equal to a price today of £7904. Remarkably a basic Dacia Sandero "Access", at just £6995, is £1000 less. However, if you want the “Essential" model, that comes with air-con, radio and electric windows, it's £7,995. Interesting!
(Inflation charts and buying power vary a little depending upon which sites you look at).
As ever, click the image for a sharper picture and click again for larger still. Download and send to Instantprint (or similar) for a wall-sized reproduction.

[Bob Culver]

I have found Cost of Living scale comparisons misleading. The index adjusts to what people typically buy, is not based on a parcel of goods or substitutes fixed over time. A tradesmans wage is a yardstick which many can relate to. According to a Brit immigrant I grilled years ago in the mid 30s as a plumber he was earning L3 17s 6d including some overtime and a teacher would have been on about L5. I suspect in 1930s there was no inflation for years. In those terms cars are now very cheap. The L300 family man would have been management or somesuch as per the suit.
Cars were more expensive here but wages were higher. Nearly everyone needed and owned a car a so were kept going longer than elsewhere and old ones wer not cheap. It is hard to accept the current worthlessness of old modern cars often in conditon undreamed of with cars of that age from the 1930s.
For the time, the Model T in USA was remarkably cheap compared with the Ford factory wage for a worker.
A Sunday drive was a common tradition into the 1950s. When our Seven was replaced by a modern in 1957 my father found 15 to 30 mile return trips no longer felt like an outing and discontinued Sunday drives.

[Renaud]

Thanks, very interesting Bob.