Yes, low rates have drove up prices.
Not exactly. While they can help keep prices high, you are being too simple. The difference in finance charges between 1980 rates and 2020 rates doesnt account for the large relative increase in cost of those items. (Relative to disposable income of the average household)
And a very large proportion of consumer debt is sitting at credit card rates upwards of 20%
The cost of homes and cars have continued to increase right about at pace. What has not increased on pace is wages. So now the 30-year mortgage and the 7-year car loan are the norm. Uheard of 30 or 40 years ago.
Furthermore, as we keep extending tax cuts to the wealthy and to corporations while wages stagnate (dropping our tax revenue as %of GDP to stupidly low levels), we have to go to one of our only tools left in the toolbox for mitigating our regularly repeating recessions: lowering the Fed target rate. What happens after that, as we recover, is that the Fed never gets a chance to get rates back up to the old par before the next recession. This again goes right back to wages. Want to kill the auto industry? Set the target rate at 7% and watch as people stop buying cars at the price needed for auto makers to be profitable.
Basically, this is all the consequence of Reaganomics. Trickle down horseshit. And we just saw a salient example in real time: Trump's ill-advised tax cuts.