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A General Motors Co. Chevrolet Blazer electric vehicle at a dealership in Colma, California, Jan. 23, 2026.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
DETROIT — American consumers are hitting a fork in the road when it comes to the U.S. automotive industry. Affluent buyers are purchasing new vehicles at increasingly higher prices, while lower-income ones are continuing to drive used models.
This trend is a growing concern for auto executives and feeds into worries that U.S. consumers are facing a "K-shaped" economy, where the wealthy keep seeing gains while those who have lower incomes struggle.
"We have a different vehicle buyer today than we had just a few years ago," Cox Automotive senior economist Charlie Chesbrough said Thursday during an auto analyst event. "The key takeaway here is that we're seeing the average buyer here is much more affluent."
Cox reports that the share of new-car buyers with incomes of less than $100,000 has dropped from 50% in 2020 to 37% last year, representing millions of lost sales. On the other end of the spectrum, the share of buyers with incomes of more than $200,000 has grown from 18% to 29% during that timeframe.
The shift has occurred as MSRP, or manufacturer's suggested retail price, hit an average of $51,000 in 2025, according to Cox, and as buyers are also dealing with higher insurance costs and inflation. Consumer sentiment, meanwhile, is at recessionary levels.
New-car sales were at record levels of more than 17 million prior to 2020 but have experienced mixed results since, ending 2025 with 16.3 million sales. Brand-new vehicles have never been for the majority of U.S. consumers, but automakers have increasingly been pricing millions of Americans out, including by cutting entry-level vehicle lines such as small cars.
"We're now relying on the extremely wealthy to generate the sales," Mark Barrott, a partner at consulting firm Plante Moran, said during the Thursday event. "That's a structural problem from an affordability perspective."
Barrott said U.S. sales aren't hitting records but that they're still pretty good compared with historical levels. Automotive executives may begin taking more notice if the market conditions shrink due to buyers getting priced out, he added.
"It's not unrealistic to think that in the next two or three years we could get to that kind of level, and then this really starts to hurt the [automakers]," he said.
A modeling study by Plante Moran found a third of the U.S. population can't afford new vehicles, with very limited choices for those who may be on the fence. There are roughly 110 "affordable" models, in relative terms, for household incomes of $65,000 or less compared with more than 250 "affordable" models for those with incomes of up to $105,000, according to the study.
The median household income in the U.S. was $83,730 in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That has risen 24% since 2020, when it was $67,521.
U.S. average transaction prices for new vehicles, meanwhile, were hovering around $50,000 toward the end of last year, up 30% from less than $38,747 to begin 2020, according to Cox Automotive.
CarMax's Edmunds this month reported new-car buyers are increasingly spending more per month on the purchase of a new vehicle, with a record of 20% committing to average monthly payments of more than $1,000 during the fourth quarter of last year.
Ford CEO Jim Farley earlier this month warned the U.S. automotive industry needs to be mindful of affordability concerns leading to consumer pullback. While producing larger, more expensive vehicles can be more profitable for automakers, it can shrink the market and lower sales.
"Anyone in the auto industry … we should all be very careful about consumer demand," Farley said Jan. 13 during an event for the Detroit Auto Show. "That's really important."
