The average new car buyer paid 2.5% more in April than in March — just over a month after President Donald Trump imposed a 25% tariff on imports of automobiles and certain auto parts, according to Kelley Blue Book.
Executive Editor Brian Moody, who serves in the same role for Autotrader, said the average buyer paid $48,699 last month. Prices usually increase in April, but that figure is the second-highest April jump in a decade.
Moody said a lot of buyers went to showrooms as soon as they heard about the tariffs.
“The month of March was the best sales month in four years,” Moody told WTOP. “That just shows you how many people were headed to a dealership to, in their minds, beat the tariff.”
According to Moody, people in the market for a new vehicle will benefit from doing some research about prices: “In March, Infinity, Lincoln, Mazda, Porsche and Volvo were all up, while brands like Jeep, Ram and Mercedes-Benz had lower transaction prices.”
Prices haven’t jumped severely, in part because dealers have a supply of vehicles that were brought into the country before the tariffs were imposed.
In the future, “Any car that’s built wholly inside the U.S., even if they do use parts from overseas, are likely to have reduced or lower tariffs, or none,” Moody said.
Automakers are trying to avoid significant price increases as long as possible. Several, including Hyundai, Nissan and Mercedes-Benz, have publicly pledged to keep prices flat until particular dates.
“Ford recently said that one of their vehicles that’s made in Mexico, they had to raise the price,” Moody said. “But that still means the rest of their vehicles might be more reasonably priced, because they’ll want to spread those increases out across multiple vehicles.”
As an alternative to a new car, “Used car prices were already going to be headed up by the end of 2025 and into 2026,” Moody said. “Whatever impact the tariffs have in turning people away from news cars to used cars is only going to make that worse, but used cars were already heading up.”
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