A Ford Cost 40 Ounces of Gold in 1913. A New F-150 Costs 9.

Walk into a car dealership in 2026 and the first thing you'll hear is the price. A new Ford F-150 XL starts at about $40,000. That's the bestselling vehicle in America. Luxury trucks run $80,000 or higher. Mid-range sedans start around $35,000. Even efficient compact cars hover near $25,000. The sticker shock is real, and the financing makes it worse. A 68-month loan at 7% on a $40,000 vehicle means $600 monthly payments and $8,800 in total interest. That's a serious obligation on top of your first mortgage.

Everyone "knows" cars have gotten insanely expensive. New vehicle transaction prices average $48,000 across the industry. Financing terms have stretched from 36 months in the 1970s to 72, 84, even 96-month loans becoming standard. The average American spends about 18% of household income on vehicle-related costs. It feels like a crisis.

But have cars actually gotten more expensive? Or has the measuring stick changed?

A Ford Model T cost $825 in 1913. At the gold price of $20.67 per ounce that year, that was roughly 40 ounces of gold. A new F-150 XL costs about $40,000 in 2026. With gold near $4,600 per ounce, that's roughly 9 ounces of gold. About a quarter the gold for an incomparably better machine. And it's not even close.

The raw numbers

The comparison seems absurd at first: a Model T and an F-150 are completely different vehicles, separated by 113 years of industrial evolution. But that's precisely the point. The gold price reveals something the dollar price conceals. Here's the data across a century of vehicle pricing.

Year	Vehicle	Price (USD)	Gold / oz	Price in Gold (oz)
1913	Ford Model T	$825	$20.67	~40
1970	Ford F-100	$2,500	$35.00	~71
2026	Ford F-150 XL	~$40,000	~$4,600	~9

The dollar column shows the expected story: $825 to $2,500 to $40,000, an unbroken march upward. In dollars, vehicles cost 48 times more in 2026 than they did in 1913. In dollars, the truck industry has become expensive.

The gold column tells a completely different story: 40 ounces, then 71 ounces, then down to 9 ounces. Vehicles cost less than a quarter of the gold they did a century ago. The spike in the middle — the apparent expense of 1970 — is an artifact of the same phenomenon we saw in the housing essay: the Bretton Woods price-fixing of gold at $35 per ounce, a price that no longer reflected reality. In real, freely-traded gold terms, a Ford F-100 in 1970 cost somewhere between 25 and 31 ounces, not 71. The inverted U is a mirage created by government price controls, not a market signal.

Strip away the dollar's deterioration, and the pattern becomes clear: vehicles have gotten steadily cheaper across the entire century when measured in honest money. In dollars, they look expensive. In gold, they look like one of the great bargains in the history of manufacturing.

What a "car" actually was

The obvious pushback: a Model T and an F-150 aren't the same product. You can't compare them directly. And that's correct — which makes the gold-ounce comparison even more remarkable.

The 1913 Ford Model T was a triumph of manufacturing engineering and a marvel of affordability. It was also barely functional by modern standards. Twenty horsepower from a four-cylinder engine. Top speed: 45 miles per hour. No electric starter — you cranked the engine by hand, which required strength and careful technique; broken wrists and arms from backfires were common. No windshield wipers (you had to stop and clean the windshield manually). No heater. No radio. Open-air or a basic fabric hardtop. The steering wheel was on the left, but not all components were standard; variants existed. Safety equipment didn't exist: no seatbelts, no bumpers worthy of the name, no crumple zones. The chassis was simple: solid axles, mechanical brakes, no suspension to speak of. The vehicle broke down constantly. Owners expected to perform repairs routinely. Roads were mostly unpaved dirt. An average lifespan was about five years, after which the vehicle was essentially scrap. A single income could cover the purchase price, though it was a serious commitment.

By 1970, the Ford F-100 represented a genuine truck. Up to 255 horsepower was available from the 390 V8 engine — a 12-fold increase in power. Electric starter, of course. AM radio became standard. Heater, essential in northern states. Automatic transmission was available as an option, though manual was standard. Power steering and power brakes were becoming standard, though some base models still had manual everything. The truck had a proper cab with decent weather sealing, roll-up windows, and working wipers. It was reliable, or at least reliably unreliable in predictable ways. Still no airbags (they didn't exist yet), no ABS, no air conditioning in the base model, no safety glass standard until late in the decade. A competent mechanic could repair most issues. Average lifespan stretched to about 10 years. Two incomes were increasingly necessary for a family purchase, though a single income could still manage in many regions.

Today's 2026 Ford F-150 XL is something else entirely. 325 horsepower standard from the EcoBoost engine. Ten-speed automatic transmission. Touchscreen infotainment with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. Adaptive cruise control. Lane-keep assist. Backup camera (legally required). Four cameras for 360-degree view available. All-around airbags. Anti-lock brakes. Electronic stability control. 4G/5G connectivity standard. Optional hybrid powertrain available. Towing capacity of 14,000 pounds. The interior materials and ergonomics are superior to luxury vehicles from 20 years ago. Climate control is precise. The ride is smooth. Fuel economy is better despite the power. Expected lifespan is 15 years or more with basic maintenance. Reliability is exceptional — catastrophic failures are rare.

Consider the specifics. The 2026 F-150 produces 325 horsepower. The 1913 Model T produced 20. That's a 16-fold increase in available power. Acceleration, payload capacity, towing ability, and ability to navigate grades are incomparably superior. The 1913 car broke down constantly. The 2026 truck is reliable enough that owners barely think about maintenance between scheduled intervals. The 1913 Model T had no safety features whatsoever. The 2026 F-150 has a comprehensive suite of active and passive safety systems designed to prevent collisions and protect occupants in the event of one. The 1913 car had minimal comfort: no heat, no radio, brutal ride quality. The 2026 truck has climate control, entertainment systems, and suspension tuned for both comfort and capability.

And yet, measured in gold, the 2026 truck costs roughly one-quarter what the 1913 car cost. Not a little less. Not slightly more with inflation accounted for. About a quarter. A 2026 Ford F-150 is not the same product as a 1913 Model T in any meaningful sense. It's dramatically superior in every category: power, reliability, safety, comfort, capability, and longevity. And in the only unit of measurement that doesn't lie about itself — gold — it costs far less.

Henry Ford's real revolution

Henry Ford's obsession was not making cars "better" in the way that word is used today. It was making them cheap enough for ordinary workers to afford. He famously said he would build a car for the great multitude, and he meant it.

In 1913, the Model T cost $825. By 1920, thanks to continuous improvements to the assembly line, it cost $355. By 1925, the price had fallen to $260. That's a 68% price reduction in 12 years, all the while improving the design and increasing wages. At the gold price of $20.67 per ounce in 1913, a Model T cost 40 ounces. By 1925, when gold was still trading near $20 per ounce, the same car cost just 13 ounces. Ford had cut the gold cost of a vehicle nearly in thirds.

His motivation was radical: if workers could afford to buy the product they made, they would have better lives, and the company would create its own market. In 1914, he doubled the daily wage to $5 a day — a shocking move that was widely criticized as economically irrational by his peers. But Ford understood something about money and purchasing power. A $5 daily wage in 1913 was roughly equivalent to a quarter-ounce of gold per day. At that wage, a worker could buy a $260 Model T (the 1925 price) with about 52 days of labor — a little over two months' wages set aside for a vehicle (Ford's $5 day was an unusually high wage for the era).

Today, the median household income in the United States is approximately $80,000 per year, or about $308 per day (assuming 260 working days). A 2026 Ford F-150 XL priced at $40,000 costs about 130 days of median household wages. So in pure labor time, a vehicle purchase in 2026 requires less time sacrifice than it did a century ago — roughly 5 to 6 months of household wages set aside.

But here's what the gold price reveals: that sacrifice in labor time buys you an incomparably better product. A century ago, even a cheap, hand-cranked, unreliable vehicle that could barely exceed 45 mph took a meaningful slice of a year's wages. In 2026, roughly five to six months of median household wages buys a vehicle that's 16 times more powerful, infinitely more reliable, exponentially safer, and expected to last three times longer. The labor cost is comparable; the product quality is not even on the same scale.

This suggests that the real gains in productivity over the past century have been substantial and genuine. Manufacturing has gotten more efficient, more precise, and more capable. The problem is that wage earners haven't captured the full benefit of those productivity gains — not because manufacturers are greedy, but because the currency in which wages are denominated has been systematically debased. Ford's manufacturing revolution was real. The dollar's deterioration masked it.

Why car payments feel so painful

The pain of a car payment is real and immediate, even if the overall affordability picture is better than it appears.

In 1970, a typical car loan ran 36 months at 6% interest. On a $2,500 purchase, that meant roughly $73 monthly payments and about $230 in total interest. Painful for a median income household, but not devastating. The loan term matched the expected useful life of the vehicle, so you owned it outright before it became unreliable.

By 2026, the typical financing has stretched to 68 months (5 years and 8 months) at average rates around 7%. On a $40,000 F-150, that's $600 monthly payments and over $8,800 in total interest. The payment is larger not just because the vehicle costs more in dollars, but because the financing structure has fundamentally changed. You're now paying interest on the vehicle for nearly six years — the entire span during which you'd expect it to be reliable and require no major repairs.

The psychological and financial burden is real. $600 per month is a serious obligation. For a household with an $80,000 annual income, it represents roughly 9% of gross income dedicated to a single vehicle. Add insurance, fuel, and maintenance, and you're easily at 18% of income consumed by transportation.

But here's the critical insight: the painfulness of the payment is a dollar problem, not a vehicle problem. The pain emerges from the financing structure and the currency denomination, not from any meaningful change in what the vehicle actually costs in real terms. If vehicles were priced and financed in gold, the psychological burden would be completely different. An F-150 at 9 ounces of gold, financed over 60 months, would be 0.15 ounces per month — a few gold coins. That's a fundamentally different psychological experience than "$600 per month," even though the real value is identical.

The perceived "car affordability crisis" is in large part a dollar crisis. The currency in which we've denominated the transaction has lost so much value that payment structures feel stretched even as real affordability has improved. The vehicle itself has become a vastly better product and a better deal in gold terms. But in dollars, sticker shock and long financing terms create the illusion of unaffordability.

What cars got, what they cost, and what disappeared

One more way to see the same story: the history of what you get per ounce of gold spent on a vehicle.

In 1913, 40 ounces of gold bought you a Model T: 20 horsepower, 45 mph top speed, hand-cranked starter, open-air cab, constant breakdowns, and an expected lifespan of five years. You could buy two of them with the same gold if you wanted redundancy.

In 1970, in real gold terms (using the free-market price of $80-100 per ounce rather than the suppressed $35 official price), an F-100 cost roughly 25-31 ounces of gold. You got up to 255 horsepower from the 390 V8, electric starter, AM radio, heating, and a vehicle that would last a decade.

In 2026, 9 ounces of gold buys an F-150 XL: 325 horsepower from its EcoBoost engine, 10-speed automatic, Apple CarPlay, adaptive cruise control, backup cameras, all-around airbags, 4G/5G connectivity, and an expected lifespan of 15+ years. The same 40 ounces that bought a Model T in 1913 would buy more than four modern F-150s.

Measure the progression in dollars, and you see: $825 to $2,500 to $40,000. A steady march of inflation. Measure it in gold, and you see: 40 ounces to 25-31 ounces to 9 ounces. A steady march of deflation, revealing that cars got cheaper while getting exponentially better.

This is the pattern we've seen across the entire series: food, housing, and now transportation. In every category, gold reveals that products got better and cheaper across the long term. The dollar hid that progress behind a curtain of nominal price increases.

Henry Ford spent his life making cars cheaper. He succeeded. You just can't see it through the dollar.

The question that should concern you is not whether cars are expensive. The question is whether the dollar is an honest way to measure them. If the dollar is deteriorating, then all prices denominated in dollars are climbing not because products got more expensive, but because the measuring stick got shorter. You're watching the ruler shrink, not the objects grow.

What it means now

This is the fifth essay in this series, and the pattern is now impossible to ignore. Food costs 60% of what it did in 1913 when measured in gold. Houses cost roughly the same amount of gold as they always have, while becoming dramatically superior products. Vehicles cost about a quarter what they cost a century ago in gold, while becoming exponentially better machines. In every case, the dollar tells a story of inflation and declining affordability. Gold tells a story of progress and falling prices.

The immediate take-home is straightforward: if you're tracking your purchasing power, tracking inflation, or trying to assess whether you're getting richer or poorer in real terms, the dollar is lying to you. A chart that shows "rising vehicle prices" is actually showing a rising gold-to-vehicle ratio (i.e., deflation) — prices falling measured against something that doesn't lose value. The same is true for housing, for food, and for virtually every category of goods where quality improvements are both substantial and continuous.

The deeper question is this: what currency are you holding your savings in? Every dollar you own today is a bet that the Federal Reserve will maintain its purchasing power tomorrow. That bet has failed consistently and dramatically over any horizon longer than a few years. Meanwhile, the assets that maintained purchasing power — gold, land, productive equipment, stocks in well-managed firms — are the ones that let you buy the same things for less over time. The vehicle price drop from 40 to 9 ounces isn't because Ford got worse at making cars. It's because gold holds its value, and the dollar doesn't.

You're already saving in something. The only question is whether you're doing it consciously. The car payment you're making next month is denominated in dollars, which is a choice. You could denominate it in gold, and the payment would be smaller and feel less painful. You could denominate it in bitcoin, and the question of whether it's expensive or cheap would depend on a different set of variables. The point is that the denomination matters more than the number.

Cars have never been cheaper in real, gold-standard terms. The dealer is telling you the truth when they quote the price in dollars. But they're telling you an incomplete truth. Gold tells you what the dollar won't.

This is the fifth essay in The Great Remember's series on prices, purchasing power, and the history of money. Next and final: what happened to your paycheck when measured in gold — the essay that ties the whole series together. See all essays →