Number of Cars on Dealer Lots Climbing Higher & Higher Across USA

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Much has been said in recent months about supposedly slumping EV sales growth. As we’ve pointed out on a number of occasions now, EV sales are actually soaring at many automakers in the USA, including at Ford, GM, Rivian, Audi, BMW, and several others.

However, it seems there’s a brewing issue in the broader US auto industry…. Reportedly, cars, trucks, and SUVs are growing in number on dealer lots across the country.

In fact, vehicle inventory on dealership lots has reached its highest level in 4 years! And in case you forgot, we were deep into the severe shutdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic at this time 4 years ago.

In June, there were nearly 3 million vehicles (2.96 million) sitting on dealer lots. “That works out to about a 76-day supply, and it’s up from 2.89 million vehicles a month earlier,” Jalopnik writes. “It’s also a million more vehicles than where it was at the same time last year — 1.95 million.”

Whatever reasons for it may be (I’ve got several ideas), people are not buying as many cars, trucks, and SUVs as automakers and dealers expected they’d be buying this year.

One more very interesting note on this matter for me is this one: “AutoNews says vehicles that cost between $20,000 and $30,000 have a 61-day supply. At the same time, vehicles that cost between $60,000 and $80,000 can sit on a lot for about 97 days.” So, after automakers decided to cut more and more of the affordable cars from their lineups, arguing people don’t want them, it turns out that these cheaper cars are the ones that move off lots the fastest while the “sweet spot” of cars in the much more expensive $60,000 to $80,000 price range are sitting on lots longer and longer. Maybe the issue is largely that people just don’t want to spend $50,000+ on cars any more?

Other possibilities include: people are waiting for better models (including coming electric vehicle models) and are not so content with the current old-school options, people are waiting for interest rates to drop, people are wary about the economy given that it’s an election year and we don’t know who will be president in half a year, people don’t feel confident about their financial situation, the demographics that buy more new cars are dropping in number while the younger demographics are not as keen to buy new cars (or cars at all), there was a big burst of car buying after the pandemic and after supply chains got worked out and there’s now a bit of a lull in new-car demand, and/or people are waiting on robotaxis and hesitant to buy cars without self-driving capability (I don’t actually think this is notable at all, but I had to throw it in). Any other ideas? I’m sure I’m missing some here.

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