With fewer new cars in the market, US consumers have been turning to used-car lots, driving prices higher. And although car makers have been reopening their assembly lines since then, they have been slowed by a variety of supply chain constraints.Ī key snag has been the ongoing shortage of computer chips, which is creating delays and prompting another round of plant closures. iSeeCars recently performed an analysis of over 1.2 million used car sales that occurred in April 2021 and found that used car prices have increased by an average of 16.8 percent, or 3,926, compared to the same period the last year. If you haven’t been shopping for a used car lately, you might not have noticed. Many manufacturing plants shut down early on in the pandemic as governments struggled to contain the virus. When used car prices skyrocket, it can mean any number of things. This is the strongest used car market, ever. Normally, a change of 1 would be unusual, but in April 2021, the used car market price is up on average by nearly 17. 2020, used car prices moved from a little. Used car prices are ticking up so fast that Bor cited a Virginia customer who bought a Range Rover last year for 26,000 and sold it this year for the same net price, essentially driving it for. Numbers obtained from auto industry insider Edmunds show that from April 2020 to Jan. Car production has been sputtering due to Covid-19. Typically, year-over-year price changes among used cars vary by less than a percent, with the change being little more than a normal deviation from a flat growth curve. The average price of a used car is nearly 30,000 the highest ever. The pandemic strained supply chainsĪmericans are starting to travel around again as pandemic restrictions ease, and the extra demand for cars is hitting at a time when supply is tight.
What’s happening in the used-car market sheds light on why. Overall consumer prices rose 0.8%, a bigger increase than expected, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.īut the pop in prices is not necessarily an immediate cause for concern for inflation hawks worried that the trillions of dollars the government has pumped into the economy will overheat it. They jumped 10% from March to April, the biggest spike since 1953, when the government started collecting data.