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Cars costing under $30,000 make up just 8 percent of the market - down from 38 percent before the pandemic. According to data from car shopping app CoPilot, cited by CNBC, expensive SUVs and trucks are in high demand, prompting carmakers to continue to upgrade their lineups and scale back on more affordable models. Not only are new vehicle prices near an all-time high, but the interest rate to finance a purchase is also soaring. 'It’s the least affordable car market in modern history,' CoPilot CEO Pat Ryan told the outlet. The average cost of a new car in May,...

This morning I discovered something *extremely* alarming happening in the car market, specifically in auto lending. I'm now convinced that there is a massive wave of car repossessions coming in 2023. Here's what I discovered (and what no one knows): Background: Over the past 2 years, many people took out exorbitant loans on cars. Car values were inflated (and frankly, still are to some extent). But many people simply had no choice and bought an overpriced a car. Well... Car valuations are now plummeting. Some cars have declined in value as much as 30% y/y. And these same people that...

Like some of you, I love to check out car models and drive salesmen crazy with the classic "just looking" line. I look at the sticker and check out all the options. It's an old habit and a wonderful way to kill time when my wife is at the mall. It beats drinking another cup of coffee at the mall café.Last week, I made another trip to the local dealership. Everything looked normal except for the prices. Check this out:With interest rates rising, it's also becoming harder to spread the pain of higher pricing with long-term financing. The average monthly...

New Toyota Vehicle Inventory - Toyota Models Near Milwaukee, WI

The cost of driving in America is accelerating–and not just because gas prices are up 60 percent from last year. The prices of new cars and trucks jumped a seasonally adjusted 1.4 percent in October and another 1.2 percent in November, data from the Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index showed Friday. Compared with a year ago, prices are up 11.1 percent. That’s the fastest annual pace of inflation for vehicles since 1975.

My husband and I went to our local Toyota dealership here in Southern Maryland - one of the largest Toyota dealerships on the East Coast - looking for a new 2022 Camry. We've owned several Camry's since 2000 and I've owned Toyota vehicles since 1980. My husband just comes along with me. He knows that I'm capable of detecting bullsh*t and cockamamie stories from sales staff, so he just sits back and listens. (He's trained me well, I must admit!) We arrived a few minutes before the dealership opened, so we took a drive in the lots in the back...

<p>"It's a combination of the coronavirus and semiconductors, but at the moment it is the coronavirus that is having the overwhelming impact," Kazunari Kumakura, an executive at the world's biggest car maker, said after the company revised its production target.</p>

I live in Manassas, Virginia and have an RV, which I took to the Camping World dealer where I purchased it for some service. My brother gave me a ride back to my home and on the drive he remarked that the dealerships did not have new vehciles in their showrooms and lots. As we passed several dealerships on the way to my place, I looked over at the lots and showrooms. Sure enough, while there were many used vehicles, where new vehicles should be on the lots and in the showrooms, it was sparse to empty. The big lie...

Total new vehicle sales in September dropped to 1.01 million vehicles, down 37% from 1.6 million vehicles in March, when there were still enough new vehicles to sell. The industry-standard Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR) of sales – which adjusts for the number of selling days per month and for seasonal factors, and converts the monthly sales into what sales would be for an entire year – plunged for the fifth month in a row, by 29% year-over-year, to 12.2 million units SAAR, the lowest, outside of the two lockdown months, since June 2011 ,according to data from the Bureau...

Junked-car auctioneer Copart, Inc., or simply Copart, reported earnings this week and said given the stellar growth in new and used car prices this year, wrecked car prices are getting a lot more expensive. On Thursday, Copart’s CEO Jeffrey Liaw told investors on an earnings call that strong used car prices are a driving force behind “the record average selling prices” for wrecked cars. Copart specializes in auctioning wrecked cars that insurers have totaled. The vehicles go to auction and are frequently bought by companies who part out vehicles. Selling prices for wrecked cars surged 20.7% in the most recent...

A microchip shortage is translating to higher car prices across America. CBS reported that the average price of a new car has topped $40,000 and that used car prices have risen nearly 30 percent due to the shortage. Lansing, Michigan, resident Heather Lyons knows that firsthand. In looking to buy a replacement for a totaled car, she said she will end up paying more to get less, according to WILX-TV. “It really is bad. My car payment last time for a decent vehicle was something I could afford and this time it’s going to be a worse vehicle for more...

All newly manufactured vehicles to be sold in the U.S. are required as of Tuesday to have backup cameras equipped as a standard feature. Advocates for the rule, which was mandated by the National Highway Transportation Safety Agency in 2014, hope today’s milestone will lead to fewer instances of drivers backing into people due to a lack of visibility. “This day is so important because we don’t have a choice” when it comes to children’s safety around cars, said Janette Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars.org, an advocacy group that works to prevent accidents involving children and motor vehicles. “This...

The days when a bare-bones "stripper" car came with vinyl seats, rubber floor mats and no air conditioning are long gone. Today, convenience and cold air come standard for all models, along with a long list of niceties that were once the sole domain of the loaded vehicle. A base Chevy Spark, as one example, offers aluminum wheels, ten standard airbags, power windows — even six months of OnStar service, in case you lock your keys in the car. On the surface, the new car market is offering better values than ever. There is just one small problem with nearly...

It is not coincidence that these two unofficial taxes--healthcare and college tuition--are soaring in cost, outpacing all other household expenses. I have long argued that to make an apples-to-apples comparison of real tax rates in the U.S. and other equivalently developed advanced democracies, we have to include two enormous expenses that are funded by the central state in countries such as Denmark and France: healthcare and college tuition/fees. In The Real-World Middle Class Tax Rate: 75% (July 5, 2012), I estimated that healthcare insurance (if paid out of gross income, as we self-employed workers do) in the U.S. is roughly equivalent to...

Fifty-five years after the Communist takeover in Cuba, residents there can now buy new and used cars without a government permit, but with the massive mark-up on new car prices by state-run retailers, most ordinary Cubans won’t benefit from the new rules, reported BBC News. A new Peugeot 508 model, for example, is selling for $262,000 in Havana at a dealership, and even used VWs are selling for more than $60,000. …

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The U.S. used-car market is facing big supply shortages and unusually high prices these days, so consumers might as well buy certain models new instead of used, since there's little difference in price. "We're in a bit of a strange situation right now in that there simply isn't a lot of used-car inventory out there," says Eric Lyman of market tracker TrueCar.com. Dealers have few used cars to sell because not many people bought or leased new vehicles during the 2008-10 economic meltdown, so there's a dearth of 3- to 5-year-old automobiles entering the resale market...

The city car of the future will seat two people, run on electric power and communicate with other vehicles to reach a destination faster while automatically avoiding traffic tie-ups and crashes.

STUTTGART, Germany and AUBURN HILLS, Mich., Oct 8, 2002 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX/ -- -- DaimlerChrysler will launch the world's first fleet of fuel cell passenger cars in the United States and Europe in 2003, the company said. The fuel cell vehicles, based on the Mercedes-Benz A-Class passenger car, will be called the "F-Cell." "With these vehicles, we become the first manufacturer to put fuel cell cars on the road," said Prof. Ferdinand Panik, head of Fuel Cell Development at DaimlerChrysler. "The hydrogen-powered F-Cell cars are genuine zero- emission vehicles which have left the research stage and are now going to...

On October 2, Ford presented the first "ready to go into production" version of its Fuel Cell Car "Focus FCEV Hybrid" in Aachen, Germany. The new car is a hybrid vehicle, which runs without producing any type of toxic emissions and attains a level of fuel efficiency that far exceeds any modern combustion engine. With a maximum effficiency of 90 percent, the Ford Focus FCEV Hybrid offers the highest specific output (power-from-fuel-ratio) of any known propulsion system. Ford researchers have achieved this significant increase in fuel efficiency by combining two previously independent systems into a sophisticated hybrid electric powertrain. In...

The word Monaro is of Aboriginal origin - it means high plateau, which is fitting, really. The Monaro has always been a performance car and if Holden has its way, the Australian icon will make a stunning comeback at the end of the year.The concept was simply called the Holden Coupe, though when it was showed for the first time to Jo public at the Sydney motor show in 1998, it was unofficially named the Monaro by pundits and show-goers.The name stuck and pre-orders for a car which hadn't even been manufactured were enough to persuade Holden to manufacture the...