Events of the past 2 years have upset many an apple cart, with the automotive marketplace being upended and scrambled numerous times. We went from no business to unbelievable demand, white-hot used car markets and a rush on new vehicles, and now we have chip shortages constricting supply. The car market now changes as quickly as our weather.
One interesting development is that very-high-mileage vehicles (over 100,000 miles) are more and more populating dealer used car inventories. Just a year or two ago you would rarely see dealers present cars with 6-figures on their odometers. It wasn’t that the cars weren’t solid – vehicle quality has increased exponentially over the past decades, and there is better record keeping with vehicle history companies documenting service histories and records of accidents. There would be plenty of well-broken-in cars in the marketplace, you just would usually find them at used car lots or independent dealers.
But here we are – according to Automotive News, the trend is due to the following factors:
- Vehicles last longer. The average age of America’s fleet is around 12 years.
- Rising new-car prices have driven up the value of used cars.
- More vehicles are getting repaired instead of scrapped.
- Used-car prices have soared roughly 40 percent since the start of the global microchip shortage, pushing them into older, higher-mileage vehicles.
- Consumers are getting more comfortable buying high-mileage vehicles.