So JD Power drops their April forecast showing new car sales off 7.3% year over year and the immediate spin is that it's just a comparison problem because April 2025 had a tariff-driven rush that pulled 53,000 extra buyers into the market early. And sure, that's technically true. The SAAR is still projected at 16 million which isn't catastrophic. But I work at an OEM and I can tell you that the internal reaction to these numbers is not "don't worry about it." The average buyer is now paying $812 a month. Eight hundred and twelve dollars. That number is not getting better with tariffs still on imported parts. So I'm curious what people on the OEM side are actually doing with their volume forecasts for the rest of the year.
April 27, 2026 - 23:58
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The payment number is the…
The payment number is the right place to focus and the problem is worse than the headline figure suggests. $812 is the average but averages hide the distribution. A significant portion of buyers financing right now are at $950 or above, which is where historical default risk starts climbing. We track this internally and the subprime tier is tightening faster than the prime tier. Lenders are pulling back on LTV limits and extending approval times. That does not show up in the SAAR projection until it does, and then it shows up all at once. The comparison period excuse buys maybe one more quarter of cover before the underlying demand picture becomes impossible to spin.
I want to push back slightly…
I want to push back slightly on the framing that the 16 million SAAR is being used as cover for bad news. The comparison base issue is real and it is not spin. April 2025 was genuinely distorted by pull-forward demand and any analyst worth listening to flagged that twelve months ago. The harder question is whether May and June normalize or whether we see a second leg down as the tariff cost increases actually hit sticker prices rather than just landed costs. Right now manufacturers are absorbing a portion of the hit to protect volume. That cannot continue indefinitely. The next sixty days will tell us a lot more than April did.
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