TOGETHER WITH:
Howdy, Fam!
Is your acquisition pricing already a month behind?
Wholesale values are softening fast, trucks, SUVs, and now luxury cars leading the drop, while retail affordability keeps moving the other way. If your guide numbers haven't caught up to this week's market, you're either overpaying at auction or underpricing the gap to your customer. Either one costs you.
Also in today's email:
Carvana's record quarter, and the two things about it any store can actually copy
The three-day camp quietly building next decade's technician pipeline
Six auto stories worth two minutes each, Ferrari to a Top Gear host's speeding fine
Keep Pushing Back,
—Chris with Paul, Kyle & Kristi
Reading time: 4 min and 06 sec
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The Real Lesson Inside Carvana's Record Quarter
If you squint, it looks exactly like a Carvana location
Carvana posted its biggest quarter ever: 197,325 vehicles sold and $7.4 billion in revenue, up 38% year over year, with three more ADESA sites bringing its retail production network to 19 locations.
That sales volume puts us at just 2% market share of the used car market, and 1.5% of the auto retail market as a whole.
Want the full conversation?
🎙️ Listen to today's Automotive State of the Union episode for the complete discussion.
Reconditioning Speed and Convenience Are Doing the Real Work
Centralized, dedicated reconditioning is what lets Carvana turn inventory fast enough to convert shoppers before they look elsewhere. Just as telling, customers earning over $100,000 grew more than 60% year over year as Carvana leaned into convenience, not just price, for buyers who already pay for it everywhere else in their lives.
What This Means for Your Store
Map your own reconditioning path this week. If used inventory routes through the same shop as service work, that's real turn time lost. Carvana's edge isn't its size, it's doing a couple of things well while its market share is still small enough for any store to compete on execution.
Fix What's Costing You Sales – All in One Platform!
iPacket helps create smoother follow-up conversations with transparent, trust-building vehicle presentations.
iPacket Value removes the guesswork from appraisal decisions with 100% OEM-verified competitive pricing data. iPacket OnTargeting keeps your inventory top-of-mind with highly targeted, low-funnel remarketing. And iPacket Recon accelerates pre-owned operations through intuitive workflow management software tailored to your team’s reconditioning process.
Wholesale Is Cheap Right Now. Your Buyers Still Feel Stretched.
The quick facts:
Wholesale values are softening, trucks, SUVs, and now luxury cars leading the drop
Retail affordability is moving the other way, the income needed to buy an average new vehicle rose again in June
Transaction prices are still climbing even as wholesale gets cheaper to acquire
Consider This Today
Customers are hearing about price changes from somebody; why not you?
Be your community's car news source. Communicate the reality of car shopping going into August 2026 using the data snapshot above.
And now... back to you, Tom.
This Is How You Make Kids Fight to Join the Industry
Sinclair College ran a three-day automotive camp for 14 middle schoolers, teaching oil changes, battery swaps, and small-engine rebuilds alongside EV ride-alongs. Voss Auto Group sponsors it as a recruiting pipeline, and 95% of Sinclair's graduates find industry work within a month.
Amazon's Zoox Just Cleared the Bar No One Else Has
image: Zoox
Zoox became the first company approved to commercially deploy paid robotaxis with no steering wheel or pedals, capped at 2,500 vehicles a year in dense markets like Las Vegas and San Francisco. Nothing to act on today, but watch which cities get named next.
🪐 Stuff
Ford CEO Jim Farley told employees Chinese automakers could enter the US market within 5 to 10 years, even with tariffs and software bans in place.
Stellantis posted a second straight quarterly profit, North America's margin swinging from -3.5% to 1.6% as Ram sales surged on the returning Hemi V-8.
BYD's electric kei car landed over 5,000 orders in its first week in Japan, already half its full-year target, undercutting Nissan's best-selling EV on price.
Some drivers are taping over touchscreens and hunting for manual transmissions, WSJ reports, though online reaction was split on whether stripped-down tech would actually cost less to build.
Top Gear's Richard Hammond was fined roughly $2,300 and hit with seven license points after two speeding offenses in a Porsche Taycan and a Bentley Continental GT.
1790: The first U.S. patent was granted, to Samuel Hopkins for a potash-making process.
1948: President Truman helped dedicate New York International Airport, later renamed JFK Airport.
1971: Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin became the first to drive a Lunar Roving Vehicle on the Moon's surface.
Thanks for reading, Friend!
