Peak insanity. I was chatting with a guy at my son’s baseball game last week. He had a gorgeous Black/Black V60 Polestar. Says he got it at the end of March. The crazy part is what he sold to Carvana. In 2017 he bought a 2015 CPO Volvo XC60. 3 weeks later, his wife gets T-Boned. The Volvo does it’s job and there is $22K worth of damages. The insurance fixed the car and the guy figures he’d be stuck with it until the wheels fell off. When this V60 Polestar became available, just for kicks he started checking its value with the usual suspects (Vroom, Carvana, Carmax, Local dealers). He fully disclosed the damage and the dollar amount of the damage. Vroom & Carvana both offered him $11K. He puts the info into Carmax. They offer him $20K. He literally dropped what he was doing at work and drove up to the Carmax in East Haven, CT. Was there for about 2 hours, then took and Uber home.
There is a huge availability issue. I have been trying to get a new Highlander for over a week. I made a mediocre deal on 7/29 and the dealer called the next day to say they could not locate the car they thought they had. Were supposed to get me something this past week. Spoke to them to today and getting my deposit back because there is nothing for the next 6 weeks at least coming. Went shopping last night, there are no Toyota Highlanders available. There are no Nissan Pathfinders. The supply of MDXs and Pilots is pretty limited, with some expected mid month, many of which have already been sold. One place had one Highlander and the kid working without consulting his boss told me $5000 over MSRP. I laughed as I was walking out but I still have a car. Meanwhile Vroom offered $5800 over the buyout price for my 2018 Highlander that I lease
Nonsense. We all know it is the covid vax. Covid vax makes you FOMO.
Ah! 'Splains your Tik Tok addiction. Rona Strikes Back, Return of the Medi, from the SARS Wars Trilogy.
Interesting. Availability by me in Northern Virginia is tight but there are cars on lots. The smallish Toyota dealership by me has 4 highlanders and 9 highlander hybrids. CarGurus says there are 100+ models within 25 miles and I confirmed some of them are actually available on lots. Similar with Acura dealership. Stock is low but MDXs are available. Of course, this doesn’t mean you can get the color/trim combo you want and I’m sure everyone is charging at or over MSRP for these crossovers.
Anecdotally I would guess that DC area may be a bit slower (relatively speaking) of an auto market since the biggest employer, the federal government, is still remote and it doesn’t look like that’s changing before labor day.
What region of the country are you in? Have you contacted any brokers here to see if they have a new Highlander that will fit your needs & budget? When is the lease up on your Highlander? Have you considered extending your lease 6 months?
First world problems, eh ?
Metro NY area. Not a lot of Toyota brokers. Called the leasing people in Brooklyn I normally call to get an idea of price and availability and it was a joke. Wanted over $500 for a Highlander lease. For some reason except for one guy on here, the NE does not have a lot of Toyota brokers. Looked at what he had and he says inventory is slim and coming in slowly, if I do not resolve something by the end of tomorrow will have to extend my lease so I have a car that is not under warranty that already had one recent warranty repair
Sucker is what it stands for
For most of the time there were only two (now one) who’ve cornered marked on Toyota’s here prior to recent shortages. Wasn’t easy to compete.
With NY tac tags fees I’m around 565 on the high Xle $44k msrp.
With msds I can be low 500 but you can’t do them. The real deal this month is the hybrid Xle. Save $50/mo in fuel costs and they’re only $10 more then the gas engine.
Prices will remain high until inventory picks up. Dealers have absolutely no incentive to be much under msrp right now considering every single car that hits the lot sells within a couple weeks (with my inventory 90% sell a week or 2 in advance of delivery). The only thing I have going for me is huge amounts of allocation in comparison to other dealerships. So we have selection and there’s no mark ups on msrp or MF
I was looking at the XLE without Nav and was getting offers of $499 plus taxes and Bank and NY dealer fees and DMV on July 30. Plus I must have a bench, with my dogs and family the captains chairs would be useless, especially given the cramped third row. There was a little inventory in late July but I got screwed over by the dealership where I was a repeat customer, I made a deal with them (not a great deal) and they said they had what I wanted on 7/30 at another of their dealerships, then strung me along for a week. Will visit them tomorrow in my new Honda to get my deposit back! It is annoying because TBH I would have preferred the Highlander and another area dealership had two available equipped exactly as I wanted on that day (met someone who bought one) that were sold by the time my Toyota dealership said they had no inventory.
The 499 was before my trade (really a lease return). I know what CarMax and Vroom would offer for the trade but it would actually be a pain because CarMax wanted us to bring in the car and they are two hours away. Not a big deal but my spouse is not from the roadtrippers. Interestingly the Toyota dealerships lowballed me on the trade more than the Honda dealership did! Ended up leasing through a credit union that someone recommended and getting a decent but not spectacular return for my 2018 lease ($3200) which I applied to the out of pocket on the new lease. Ended up not having to pay anything out of pocket and paying about the same as the deal would have been back in 2018 but without the $2400 I would have paid then for the first payment, taxes and bank fee. Since I really feel like I did not own anything with my lease so selling it, I really did not give up anything and who knows when there will be more stock of anything
Price dropped to $61k. Still no suckers…YET.
If anyone kept watch on the inflation numbers yesterday you could see that used car prices for the first time in months went absolutely no where and if this holds true, next month we could possibly see prices drop 2% 3% 4% 5%. Still have a long way to go though before we see significant changes in the overall industry.
It could also be because a lot of companies pushed back their re-opening plans and the maddened dash to buy any car to get to work has slowed down.
I’m sure Carvana and others will do their best to keep the prices inflated as they are now sitting on a metric f-ton of cars that they bought at ridiculous prices.
I have already received a few emails this week from Carvana that said “good news! the car you were interested in has dropped in price”. I didnt receive any of those a month or two ago…
Phew, glad I sold to Carvana when I did. A few others here also called the peak back in June/July.
Headlines are often lagging indicators of trends, so I had a feeling when I was reading all of the articles about “people are paying $xxxx over MSRP for 2 year old Toyotas!” and I even noticed friends and family talking about it…that it was about to pop.
Next up: chip shortage eases, and dealers are going to be flooded with new inventory. Mark my words: there will be a headline + photo within the next year showing dealer lots without a single space available. And we’ll all be talking about the “Great Car Glut of 2022/23” 
Stock is up a gigantic 50% in 3 months. Once used car prices plummet. Which they will, carvana will have to unwind tens and tens of thousands of used cars at discount, let’s see how they hold up if used car prices start to drop while the chip shortage unwinds and new inventory floods the markets.
We can only hope for new inventory to flood the markets, unless they hold back entirely on purpose and send just a few thousand cars in each month to keep the market prices hot and msrps at record highs