While there certainly is a degree of misleading going on, I feel that your deomonstration of such could be better.

I could eat an expensive steak dinner and pay the same amount that I could have bought an ounce of gold.

Does this mean that I wasted my money on that meal? Not necessarily.

Now I 'get' your point. Vehicles lose an obscene amount of their value when they roll out of the showroom and become "used", and that value just continues dwindling.

But a vehicle does add value to an individual's life, just as a steak dinner does. It (hopefully) enhances our mobility, or provides us with a rich experience. The trade-off may not be entirely fair but one cannot use gold to move us around or fed us (OK... well 'maybe' the later... sort of).

There are also bigger concerns at play but I think that you already know this even if you didn't state them. ^_^