#Manheim

Wholesale used-vehicle prices continued to climb during the last weeks of 2022, though the overall trend actually had secondhand valuations down by 15 percent for the entire year. That’s due largely to auction prices cooling off after the summer ended and the situation has many speculating that 2023 could be the first year we see massively inflated car prices begin to return to normal.

If you’ve started hoarding auto parts in the event that future car prices fail to stabilize, leaving you indefinitely maintaining whatever heap is currently in your garage, there’s some good news incoming. Used vehicle prices have begun to fall, even if they’ve not yet reached the kind of valuations we might actually consider reasonable.

Ok, maybe they wouldn’t walk five hundred miles but a new study from the eggheads at an American research group suggest customers are now willing to travel an average of 469 miles in order to buy a car.

Cox Automotive eliminated around 1,600 jobs this month as it prepared to better embrace online commerce (and nobody having any money). The company axed nearly 300 employees in June after having furloughed over 12,000 people in response to the coronavirus pandemic this spring. A large number of those positions were related to its Manheim auction arm, which suffered the hardest due to stringent lockdown protocols that prohibited public gatherings.

Now it’s talking about improving some of the digital features it added to Autotrader this year and embracing the virtual landscape to future-proof itself while forecasting a 25-percent cut in annual profits, and letting people go — with the majority of the layoffs coming to furloughed Manheim employees.

At this point, only two things in our present reality bear any similarity to what took place in the Great Before: average new car transaction prices are shooting for the Van Allen Belt, and pickups sell like hotcakes. The relationship between 1 and 2 can’t be downplayed.

Everything else has been turned upside down by the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting plunge in sales spurred by both fear and state lockdown measures. Domestic market share is up, zero-interest loans are proliferating, and used vehicle prices are falling through the floor.

That latter issue could spell big losses for manufacturers whose main business is selling new vehicles.

In 2013, 3.2 million new cars and light trucks were leased in the U.S., an almost threefold increase from 2009. The 2014 Manheim Used Car Report, produced by one of the larger used vehicle auction companies, says that the auto industry will have to change the way it remarkets cars if it is going to successfully handle the increased volume of off-lease vehicles.

According to Automotive News, the Manheim report also warns that dealers who take in off-lease vehicles on behalf of lessors (so called ‘grounding’ dealers, “will not be willing or able to acquire the same large share of off-lease units that they have in recent years.”