Hey everyone, great news! The average new car transaction price has officially dropped to only $48,401. Take that, rich people. New cars are finally affordable again. Time for all of us to go out and… wait, you can’t afford to spend $48,401 on a car? Damn. Me either. Well, that sucks. Still, this actually is good news even if you’re currently priced out of owning a new car. As Carscoops reports, inventory is up, payments are down and that can only mean good things for the used car market, too.
While month-to-month changes have been relatively minor, but in general, things are trending in the right direction. And while $48,401 is still a lot of money, it’s significantly less than the peak ATP of $49,929 that we saw in December 2022. It would have been great to see prices fall more than 3.1 percent over the course of two and a half years, but sometimes you have to take what you can get, especially with MSRPs increasing every year and more affordable trims and even entire models getting the axe.
Borrowers are also reportedly paying off their loans faster than they have in the last three years, monthly payments are down 1.5 percent to $753, and inventory is up 52 percent year-over-year. Additionally, incentive spending is up 59.1 percent year-over-year. While we can all agree those things are heading in the right direction, but that doesn’t mean things are improving across the board. Among compacts, ATP increased 1.3 percent between June and July to $26,798. High-end luxury cars were also up 2.8 percent to $114,181.
Hopefully, with new cars more affordable on average, that will also drive down the prices of used cars. It might not be as bad as it was at the peak of the pandemic, but the cost of NA Miatas is still too damn high.