Fast Cars And Luxury Trucks Are Getting Wildly Expensive As Cheap Cars Vanish

Speed costs, and always has, but a new report highlights how the price of performance vehicles is rocketing at a totally different rate to most other new car prices.

According to Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book data, high performance cars saw the biggest price jump of any segment in February. The average transaction price climbed to a staggering $133,918, a 14.5 percent increase compared with the same time last year.

Related: EV Sales Fell Off A Cliff, Yet New Car Prices Still Set Another Record

That’s nearly three times the industry average price and a clear reminder that buyers with deep pockets are still happily spending big on going fast. Contributing to that upswell, Porsche’s average transaction price climbed 11.1 percent to $125,458.

Truck Prices Also Booming

Luxury pickup trucks aren’t far behind their performance cousins in the inflation race. Their average transaction price surged 13.9 percent year over year to $99,698, meaning fully loaded trucks are now brushing up against six-figure territory.

Meanwhile the broader market looks far calmer. The industry average transaction price, what buyers actually pay, reached $49,353 in February. That’s up 3.4 percent from a year earlier and just 0.3 percent higher than January. Prices are still rising, but at a far more normal pace than during the pandemic-era chaos.

Kelley Blue Book’s data also shows the average sticker price (MSRP) continuing to climb. The typical manufacturer’s suggested retail price reached $51,440 in February, marking the 11th straight month the industry’s average MSRP has remained above the $50,000 mark.

Subcompacts Priced More Like Compacts

At the opposite end of the market, something interesting is happening with the smallest and cheapest vehicles. Subcompact cars posted one of the largest increases in the entire dataset, with prices jumping 11.9 percent year over year to $24,939, not far off the $27,341 average for a compact.

That might sound surprising until you remember several of the segment’s cheapest models have quietly disappeared. The Mitsubishi Mirage is already gone and the Nissan Versa is heading for the exit, leaving fewer ultra cheap options to pull the average down.

That shift may also explain why Nissan and Mitsubishi recorded some of the biggest brand level price increases in the report, with transaction prices rising more than 10 percent year over year for both.

EV Incentives High

Electric vehicles, however, moved slightly in the opposite direction, KBB’s data shows. Their average price dipped to around $55,300 in February, helped along by hefty incentives that now average more than 14 percent of transaction prices. As gasoline vehicle prices climbed slightly while EV prices softened, the gap between electric and internal combustion models narrowed to roughly $6,500, one of the smallest spreads recorded so far.

Industrywide incentives also ticked upward in February, averaging 6.9 percent of transaction prices, up from 6.5 percent in January and roughly in line with the 7.0 percent level seen a year earlier. Luxury vehicles and compact SUVs attracted the most generous deals, while high-performance cars and full-size SUVs were among the least discounted.

Sales data also suggests EV demand remains uneven. Tesla’s estimated February sales totaled about 38,500 vehicles, down 8.9 percent year over year and marking the company’s lowest monthly total since late 2021. Across the broader electric segment, sales were down roughly 26 percent from the same time last year.

But whatever shape and size of vehicle you’re buying and whatever fuel it runs on, an ATP knocking on the door of $50k means it’s a big financial commitment.

Even so, most shoppers are still purchasing vehicles priced below the overall industry average. The five best-selling segments together average roughly $44,000, and if full-size pickups are removed from that mix the weighted average drops closer to $39,000.

Average Transaction Price By Automaker

Average Transaction Price By Brand

Average Transaction Price By Segment

Data KBB, lead image Porsche