How does everyone afford very expensive cars?

[Idratherbewithmycat]

Ok yes I live in an expensive area but I can’t help but notice that everyone seems to drive expensive SUVs. Some families I know have good but normal incomes (like us) and still drive massive cars (not BMW type but bug lovely peugeots or Kia etc). I was just googling prices as we could do with upgrading what we have and OMG, it’s a lot of money!
Do people usually buy their cars on finance or upfront? We only bought a car once, it was a second hand cheap-ish car we paid fully upfront. Don’t see how we would be able to fork out £25K + for a new car!

I bought my SUV at a year old with part of the lump sum from a pension for my 60th birthday. I initially did a finance agreement as this gave me extras like free servicing etc, and then paid it off after the first installment was paid.

But it's still a liability, like a loan repayment. You can't usually just decide to stop paying and hand it back, unless you suffer pretty steep early exit charges.

I have a 2013 Ford Galaxy I own outright and a 2017 Ford Cmax. It costs me nearly nothing in maintenance currently. I will keep it until my mechanic partner can no longer viably maintain it. It’s cheap to tax, reasonable to insure and gets 50mpg for the galaxy or 60mpg for the Cmax. We’d never pay back a newer car so we’ve made the choice not to. The cost of two leases would break us.