Epa and car safety regs do a lot of that. Too expensive for serfs to have cars now. An airbag deployment will often be considered by insurance companies as a “total”.
One of the issues we have with birthrate is that many serfs (outside of urbanized yuppies) will forsake everything else - including families - to get that car. While some European mass-transit systems are held up as enviable models, too many of ours are dangerous places with roving ferals - and in my area (northeastern NJ, connected to NYC), a decaying infrastructure that is seriously impacting reliability. Many young people today are quite content to lease cars forever (paying full auto insurance forever as well) - in a state with notoriously high auto insurance. It is actually good training for the next episode for which our standard of living has visibly declined; many will be renting their living space forever as well.