Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Beggs on the Used Car Market, with used car market insights from Ricky Beggs and Black Book. It is great to be back with you this week. I hope you gained some insight from the thoughts of Steve Jordan of the National Independent Automobile Dealers Association. We will also share with you today another of the short interviews we recorded while at the recent NAAA convention in Boston.

There are some interesting things happening within the wholesale market over the past week. The time of the year typically brings us a softening of market values, and also a softening of gas prices. The past two weeks have brought us the greatest weekly change in gas prices of any point throughout the past fifty-two weeks. A price drop at the pump of $.09 each of the past two weeks has the national average now at $3.12, which is below the low point during the last year of $3.19 the week of last November 11. Current prices are $.24 below year ago prices, and there are still expectations of continuing declining prices.

How are the lower gas prices affecting the market? Four of the five more fuel-efficient car segments all had over .50% decline in price this past week. Overall the -$77 average car segment change is $1 better than the previous week and $2 better than the car change one year ago. That is a pretty consistent overall car market. The luxury-oriented cars along with the Full-size Cars segment had increased levels of change this past week as compared to two weeks ago.

The truck segments overall have brought us a real change from all the recent positive talks. The trucks average segment change of -$94 is the largest weekly average segment change within the cars or trucks over the past year. With the steadiness of the trucks over the past few months are we in for a necessary adjustment? It for sure is not being driven by the price of gas. Some segment change that was a little of a surprise was for the first time in the past four weeks, the full-size cargo and passenger vans  did not have week over week increases, coming in at -$32 and -$38 respectively this past week.

Thank you for taking the time to join us for our thoughts on the used market. We hope you will join us again next week, same time and same place for our weekly market update. Have a great week and we will be looking for you on the auction lanes.