Over the past decade "status" has become much more important for a lot of people, and what better way to show it than with an expensive car? Clothes don't shout "hey I'm expensive", if anything luxury brands are less loud. Property, meh, other than your neighbors nobody sees your house. Everyone has an iPhone and Apple Watch, and real expensive watches like Rolex are for old business men. So all that's left is cars.

I live in a post-Soviet country where minimum wage is something like €600/mo, yet the amount of luxury cars I see on the road is honestly staggering. I have no doubt these are on lease, but the payments and insurance must be thousands per month.

The funny thing is the tagline for Porsche here is "standout from the crowds while others dissapear". Sometimes it feels like I'm being a rebel by not having a Porsche, BMW, Audi, Mercedes or Range Rover.

(I drive a 18 year old MPV I bought for €3k earlier this year. It works amazingly well at getting me from point A to point B)

The norm is defined by what everyone else around you seems to be doing, and will expect you to do the same so as not to provoke introspection about why their comfort zone is the way it is. So this depends quite a bit on who the "everyone around you" is and what their influences are.

Article says 17%, which is surprising to me, but I’m not sure what it means exactly. You can construct a loan that has basically any monthly payment. Hard to tell if rising monthly payments is a bad sign. Could be shorter terms due to higher rates?

I don't have a handy article to link, but US vehicle loan terms have been steadily increasing for a while now. Many people end up rolling negative equity into their next loan, which can push them into choosing something more expensive for their next vehicle because the lender has a limit on what percentage of the new loan can be rolled-over negative equity.

My suspicion is that this trend is driven by long loan terms, high interest rates, and loans being larger than the cost of the vehicle.