I’m in Detroit, Michigan, the home of America’s car manufacturing industry, nicknamed the “Motor City”.
It’s a sprawling network of highways and overpasses, so owning a car here is a necessity.
That means the soaring cost of fuel prices has hit Detroit residents particularly hard.
Some petrol stations we’ve passed have prices pushing $US5 a gallon (that’s about $1.90 a litre).
That may sound on the cheaper side to Australians, and there are several reasons for that.
Australia’s fuel excise is more than double the average total US fuel tax per litre. The US also produces a lot of its own fuel, while Australia imports it.
It’s also relative; the median household income in Detroit is roughly half the national US average, so people are especially feeling the financial squeeze.
Michigan is home to a critical Senate battle at the midterm elections, and the cost of living is a major issue for voters.
The race is considered closeand while polls show the Democrat’s vote increasing in many parts of the US, the Republicans are rated a chance to flip this seat.
We visited an auto repair shop in the city’s north-east to hear how car owners were faring on the eve of the midterm elections.
Our visit coincided with new reporting from the Financial Times that petrol prices across the US are set to hit a record high of any administration one day before the midterms.
“It’s astronomical,” Ericka Hampton said, a tattoo artist who dropped in with her mum to get her car serviced.
“It’s actually more expensive here than it even is in Texas. So it’s crazy how we’re the Motor City, but we’re like getting slammed the hardest. It’s crazy.”
But it’s not just the cost of filling up. Prices have crept up across the board, largely driven by inflation linked to the protracted war in Iran.
On top of that, Michigan is a border state, with Canada just a 15-minute drive from Detroit.
That means the effects of Donald Trump’s expensive trade war and tariff policies have been particularly acute here.
“Everything’s going up, and it’s not going up month to month, it’s going sometimes up day to day,” Jay Salaytah said, owner of Jay’s Auto Repairs shop.
“I can give a customer a price at four in the afternoon, they call me at 8am the next morning to authorise a repair, I go to order the parts, and all of a sudden the cost of these parts jumped up $30, $40.”
Source: www.abc.net.au
