"Afford" has different aspects of meaning, I am not sure which one you are talking about, but I will explain my perspective.
Take myself as example, I live in the Bay area. If you are familiar with the RE market here you will know for a decent single family house with OK neighbor hood and OK school district, it will cost ~2 millions currently. So if I am buying a house, the down payment for the mortgage will be easily more than $400k.
If I rent a house, with > $400k cash in hand, I can easily buy (let alone lease) a Rolls-Royce Phantom. You see, for daily life style wise, renting/buying a house is very similar. But believe it or not, when I was buying a new car, I am actually looking at Toyota Corolla, and of course, up to Rolls-Royce and Ferrari at the same time. But I do NOT think I can "afford" a RR or Ferrari (although technically speaking I have the money), and I believe both the car makers also won't consider me to be within the target customer base.
In fact there are tens of thousands of normal people here in the Bay area, who bought a ~2 million crappy house like what I did. We have the choice to buy exotic vehicles, but we ended up driving mainstream economic cars. I know quite a lot of Tesla owners (friends, co-workers etc.), they are coming from cars like camry, accord, rav4, crv, highlander. Obviously they are not that type of person who can keep constantly paying $1,200+ monthly lease payment for a S-class/7 series. The reason why they are driving a Tesla is they want to try something new, so they use some of their savings which was originally set to go into their mortgage principle/401k/529/HSA, to make up the price difference, but this is like a one-time thing, not sustainable in the long run; and they plan to keep their Tesla for very long time (so there will be no monthly payment after they have paid off the car loan), definitely not like the 3-yr lease for S class/7 series.
This is what I mean on terms of "affordable".
What makes you think that people who buy $70k cars aren't able to buy $90k or even $100k cars? And given the fact that the majority of those cars are leased rather than purchased outright, the cost difference between them is even less. Just as an example, I have been looking at everything from a $40k Stinger GT2 to a $90k Jaguar XJL. The fact that I ended up deciding to buy or lease a $55k G80 had absolutely nothing to do with my ability to afford the higher-priced cars.