美国二手车价格高企：数百万辆汽车缺口

The American auto market has gone high end, making more profits by selling fewer, pricier cars. We're selling over a million units fewer every year. And yet our industry profitability is much greater. So this is a healthier place to be in the industry. That also means more consumers than ever will be pushed into the used market, where supply is already tight. Millions of cars are still missing from the U.S., and there's reason to think it's going to be that way for years.

New vehicle sale is the marble at the top of the mousetrap game, and when you drop that marble, it's going to go through all the chutes and ladders all the way down to the bottom. Every consumer gets squeezed by these dynamics. About a decade ago, new car sales in the U.S. hit a record 17.5 million units. In 2026, forecasters expect about 16 million, almost 10% lower than the peak the auto market is cyclical. Sales rise and fall.

But since that record year, sales have stayed well below that peak and some years have been especially tight. If we compare ourselves every year since then, relative to that peak, what we find is that we have lost 16 million sales in this industry since 2016 peak levels. The real hit came during the pandemic. Supply shortages, production shutdowns and other chaos forced car companies to cut production and focus on the most profitable vehicles.

We had a supply shock to the automotive industry, right? We did. We were not able to produce 15, 16, 17 million units to go sell, whether demand was there or not, like they were not going to be made. Some exceptionally profitable years followed for many automakers and dealers, but it has also left the market with millions of missing cars. Automakers still haven't ramped up production enough to make all of the vehicles that would have been sold if the pandemic hadn't happened.

When you cut that part of the market out, It never heals itself because it is an ecosystem. Look at this chart. It shows the number of vehicles flowing into the wholesale used market, where a lot of dealers buy a lot of their used car stock. It's going to be below pre-pandemic levels through 2030. Instead, the new car market has stuck to its pivot toward older, wealthier buyers. There are products available at $30,000 and below price points, but the reality is, is people want the big SUV with the leather seats and the sunroof and the nav system and the driving assist features.

During the pandemic, because supply was so tight, automakers cut back on two longtime sales practices that have huge implications for used car supply and prices. Leasing and incentives leasing can give a buyer a lower monthly payment and an automaker or dealer a way to move more product. Leased cars were about 33% of all new car sales prior to the pandemic. That dropped to 18% in 2022, and that number is now at 24% off.

These cars are a major source of used vehicles, so that pipeline is a lot smaller than it would have been. And the makeup of those vehicles is likely to be really different in 2025. Evs were about 5% of all vehicles coming off lease. By 2028, they're going to be almost a quarter, which is great if you want an EV, but hybrids are still being leased at a rate lower than the overall market, so they'll be harder to find.

Then: incentives. Prior to the Covid 19 pandemic, average industry incentives, which are basically discounts on new cars, were about 9% of the total purchase price during the pandemic. Incentives were rare. Now they are at about 7% still below where they had been. Incentives are crucial to used car pricing. Raising incentives on new cars inevitably leads to lower used car prices. Robb calls it the waterfall effect. That's just because people would rather buy new cars if the price is right.

So the price on a one year old used car has to be lower than the price on a brand new car of the same make and model. The effect then cascades all the way down through the market, so if incentives are low used car prices will be higher and incentives are driven by new car supply. If you can't sell it, you have to discount. Automakers are just not discounting as much because they are controlling production and protecting their margins.

In fact, some people say that that record 17.5 million cars required a lot of discounting, which wasn't great for automakers. Back when we were selling 17.5 million, we were pushing vehicles. We were pushing them onto dealerships. We had way more inventory than we had demand. So automakers severely cut production during the pandemic. There were drastically fewer new cars made such that there are now fewer cars in what people call the car park, the total number of vehicles on roads in the US.

Sources of used vehicles like leasing fell dramatically and still haven't recovered, and automakers still aren't offering the kinds of incentives they used to, partly because they aren't overproducing. When OEMs had the supply shock and they were able to prioritize making those higher trim levels, they were making record profits and dealers were making record profits, too. And a lot of them were like, hey, we don't ever want to go back to where we were.

The average household income in the new car market is $150,000, nearly double the average for the country as a whole. J.d. Powers, Tyson Jominy said that someone buying a new car right now might find the monthly payment has gone up by $150, or $200 for a car that might be pretty similar to the one they were trading in. Prices have gone up about a third, and yet salaries and income have not nearly matched those increases, which means there's a smaller group of buyers that can afford new vehicles.

Robb said, even nine and ten year old used cars have wholesale prices that are a lot higher than what they would normally be, indicating a lot of buyers are trading down. I think it's kind of the new normal outside of a big economic impact. Supply is not getting a lot better. One thing could turn this around. Automakers could boost production, but some might not be able to. Rob said automakers like Toyota are running close to full capacity.

Your plan is to sell a million vehicles and you hit that million. The next incremental unit you sell now is going to be extremely profitable. And so every automaker is always tempted to produce a little more than necessary. But the challenge is if everyone thinks that way, then everyone's overproducing. The only way I think that that happens if they get back into this like market share war. But I do think a lot of them are more disciplined.

Tariffs are also keeping automakers from importing cars they otherwise would from South Korea and Mexico, where many of the less expensive vehicles are made. And many in the auto industry are scrambling to keep out Chinese competition.