The idea is that you make more profit selling 50,000 cheap trucks and 50,000 expensive trucks than just 100,000 cheap trucks. When you can fool a largely innumerate populace into 84-month loans with "cheap" monthly payments, overpriced vehicles are the way to go.
All US automakers are doing the same thing. There's gentle up-marketing collusion.
The issue at root is that auto demand is a finite, population-based amount. Automakers are all pretty good at margin and manufacturing cost control.
So that leaves the only independent variable that can influence revenue and profits as {average sold vehicle price}.
New entrants face a scale issue: it's difficult to compete with the larger manufacturers' production costs with orders of magnitude less sales volume.
Which is why you historically only saw state-sponsored new manufacturers break into the market (read: Japan, Korea, China).
Electrification turned some of this on its head, but not completely. GM, Ford, et al. can still build just enough mid-market electrics to spoil others volumes, without attempting to build something really good and cannibalizing their own luxury vehicles.
Price conscious consumers have been out of the "New" car market for a very long time. New cars have a massive premium that never makes sense.
Instead of buying a brand new Geo Metro like you would in the 90s, you just buy a used Corolla or Civic. You end up with a better car and it lasts longer anyway.
That means the majority of the "New" car market has already decided price isn't that important.
Which is why the "average" new car price is $50k and people are signing up for 80 month loans on trucks.
