{"id":2032808,"date":"2026-07-08T13:41:43","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T10:41:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2032808"},"modified":"2026-07-08T13:41:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T10:41:43","slug":"almost-a-quarter-of-new-car-buyers-got-7-year-loans-last-quarter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=2032808","title":{"rendered":"Almost A Quarter Of New Car Buyers Got 7-Year Loans Last Quarter"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Folks, the cars are too expensive. The average new vehicle transaction price hit nearly $52,000 recently<\/a>, and average payments are up to lucky number $777<\/a>. It gets even worse from there, though, as those high payments are paired with ever-increasing loan terms:\u00a023.9% of new-car buyers are now opting for loans of 84 months or more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The data comes from a report by Edmunds<\/a>, which looked at new-car buyer behavior during the second quarter of 2026. Its results border on horrifying:\u00a0Over a third of car buyers now have loans longer than six years, including the nearly 25% that have those seven-plus-year loans. The average loan is now $44,156, because as car prices have gone up buyers have actually found themselves with\u00a0less\u00a0<\/em>money to put down \u2014 an average of $5,815, which is down by over $600 from the second quarter of 2025.\u00a0Is it any wonder the average age of a car on American roads keeps rising<\/a>?<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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It’s easy to blame this buyer behavior as people shopping above their budget, and that may certainly be a part of the issue, but there’s more to it than that. Wage stagnation has reached a truly dire point, with research showing that nearly half of U.S. households don’t earn enough to meet basic needs like food, water, and shelter<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 that’s all before getting into needs like “a way to get to work.” That data is from before the Trump tariffs<\/a> and before the bulk of recent AI-based job cuts<\/a>, meaning things are even worse now. Everything costs more, and no one makes enough money to cover it all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With rising costs to keep older cars on the road rising, especially now<\/a> thanks to the unprompted and unproductive U.S.\/Israeli war on Iran, it’s not unreasonable that car buyers \u2014 especially those brought up in a system that doesn’t teach financial literacy and leaves them unprepared for adulthood<\/a> \u2014 would shell out for the safety and security of a new-car warranty. If we want to address these issues, we’ll need to do more than shame people for their spending. It’ll mean a ground-up rework of our economic systems\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>our schooling.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Folks, the cars are too expensive. The average new vehicle transaction price hit nearly $52,000 recently, and average payments are up to lucky number $777. It gets even worse from there, though, as those high payments are paired with ever-increasing loan terms:\u00a023.9% of new-car buyers are now opting for loans of 84 months or more.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,247],"class_list":["post-2032808","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-jalopnik-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2032808","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2032808"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2032808\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2032808"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2032808"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2032808"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}