Closer to $20k than $10k seems insane for a budget-tier car, to me. I guess that's my age showing, but it wasn't that long ago (ten years ago? Twelve?) my in-laws got basically two identical Chevys of their shittiest possible model for under $10,000 combined. Granted I think it was the previous model year, but they weren't used cars or anything.
40 years ago, the Yugo was sold in the U. S. for $4500. I’m not questioning the truth of your story, but I think it a poor basis for arguing that cars should be $10K today. The dealer obviously was willing to take a loss to get those Chevys off the lot.
MSRP in 2010 (first I could easily find from around the same period—this was a couple years later) for the worst Chevy Aveo was under $5,000, and MSRP was rather more aspirational (bullshitty) then than it seems to be now, as far as what cars actually sell for. This wasn't even that big a mark-down from MSRP.
Your source is wrong. No one was selling new cars in 2010 for $5000. (Source: me, and my memory isn't that bad yet.) That's the reason I brought up the Yugo: in order to sell a new car for $5000 in 1985, 25 years prior to your Aveo example, a company had to buy the leftover tooling of the Fiat 128 (one of the biggest pieces of shit I've ever owned) and cut even more corners.
So 25 years on, without even looking anything up, it's pretty reasonable to assume no one was selling a car for that same price and adding airbags and ABS for the U. S. market. But if one insists on a source, Motortrend said they sold for around $12K in 2010: https://www.motortrend.com/cars/chevrolet/aveo/2010/
I don't think so... I vividly remember Nissan running commercials for the Versa in late 2008 during the darkest depths of the recession because it was one of the last models selling in the US for under $10k (like $9,990 if you got the manual transmission, etc.). There was also the Smart Fortwo, but it was a two-seater.
However, KBB's page for the 2008 Versa also says that it "had a starting MSRP of $14,025 when new" so maybe you're right? Maybe they're adjusting for inflation? It was a crazy time, obviously, with deflation so maybe there were huge discounts.
Oh weird, maybe my source was fucked then. I did find it generally hard to find any reliable-seeming info about historical car MSRPs, which seems... odd? It's strange the ways the Web fails to provide certain information (or rather, in this case, I expect it's the way modern search engines fail to surface the information we're looking for).
I bought my only-ever (and probably last-ever, as I can't stomach the prices now) new car as a 2012 Nissan Sentra, and I think it was around $14k and was definitely a way, way better car than the infamous Chevy Aveo (and a big step up from the Versa in size, power, et c., for that matter).
