Car Inventories Balloon to Highest Level Since 2009

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 1:33PM EST · Published Mar 28, 6:15AM EDT

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Car Inventories Balloon to Highest Level Since 2009 — © Thinkstock

[cnxvideo id=”655237″ placement=”ros”]Car inventories, measured by the average amount of time a car sits on a dealer lot before it is sold, reached 70 days for the first 19 days of March. This was the highest level since July 2009, which was in the middle of the Great Recession. The July 2009 figure was 80 days, according to J.D. Power and LMC Automotive.

The inventory data coincide with two other car industry trends. The first is that the average price of a car sold in the first 19 days of March reached $31,074, an all-time high for the month. This topped the previous record of $31,049 set in March 2016.

The second trend was that incentives through March 12 hit an all-time high of $3,768, topping the previous record of $3,609 set in March 2009. The researchers added:

Incentives as a percentage of MSRP are 10.4%, exceeding the 10% level in March for the first time since 2009. Then, it reached 11.3% as the industry was navigating the financial collapse of 2008/2009.

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MSRP is the price suggested by the manufacturer for cars sold at retail.

Pickup sales continue to dominate the market, as sedan sales have fallen sharply. Truck sales make up 61.5% of vehicles sold so far in March. This was the highest level ever for the month. It was also the ninth consecutive month that truck sales were 60% or more of the market.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.