I'm not talking about the wealthy, I understand how they can afford it.  It's the seemingly average Joes.

In the context of How are people paying for things, here are some possible answers from an article in the New York Times this summer:   The auto industry has evaded a slump largely because affluent Americans with well-paying jobs and robust savings have continued to buy new cars at a decent clip. And they are more than making up for the cars that lower-income Americans are no longer buying. Families with a household income of $150,000 a year or more now buy 43 percent of the new cars sold in the country, up from one-third of all cars sold in 2019 before the Covid-19 pandemic, according to Cox Automotive, a research firm. By comparison, households with incomes less than $75,000 are buying about a quarter of vehicles sold, down from more than a third in 2019.   Consider Dave Kasper, a resident of Ann Arbor, Mich. At 61, he is retired after selling two businesses and has the budget to afford new cars and trucks. Last summer, he bought his son a Ford Maverick pickup truck. The next day, he bought a Lincoln Navigator, a large, upscale sport utility vehicle, for himself. When he had problems with the Navigator’s brakes, he traded it in and bought a $93,000 Lexus TX plug-in hybrid S.U.V. “I’m fortunate,” he said.   Wealthier Americans have continued buying new cars and trucks in part because their investments are doing well. Those who own large investment portfolios have seen their holdings appreciate, making many feel that they can splurge a little. Economists call this “the wealth effect,” and analysts say it appears to have driven up spending on cars and other goods.  

It would not surprise me, and likely that 99.9% of that billion was spent by those with two X chromosomes.

Seriously?  🙄

Both died for the same reason. Safety regulations and the updated side curtain airbag requirements. It either wasn’t financially viable to invest in the existing vehicles to retrofit or just impossible without a clean sheet design. Either way, there wasn’t a viable business case for either. 

Yet people collectively spent almost $1B on Halloween costumes for their dogs this year. It’s crazy. 

So I'll let you in on something-that pickup configuration is very popular in the Houston area, I've seen F-150s with mods being called Mexican GTRs https://www.hagerty.com/media/car-profiles/friendly-ford-makes-the-american-gt-r-so-you-dont-have-to/   As for the Crown Vic and Ranger-the CV was a dinosaur that died when the Greatest/Silent Gen gave up driving 25 years ago.   The Ranger sold because it was cheap and I'm assuming helped offset the F-series with CAFE also. It died around the same time...

I don't see how the economy keeps chugging along.  How are people paying for things?  I see new houses going up everywhere, but where do these people get their money?

I have a theory that this off-road supercar with use a hybridized version of this 5.4 to draw basically a direct line from the le mans hypercar to a production car like Ford is trying to do lately with racing. I'm envisioning like a hypercar shell with a hybrid 5.4 that can tear up a racetrack, and then the suspension raises up and you can take it off road.    Beyond that product, part of me thinks this would be an awesome engine for a raptor. But I don't know if a high revving, highly strung engine would be the best fit. Maybe if they limited the revs, and gave it electric motors to boost low end torque it could work as a raptor r V.2.

The Evoque looked pretty cool when it was offered in a two-door. Unfortunately, not enough people bought them.