A General Motors Co. Chevrolet Blazer electric vehicle at a dealership in Colma, California, Jan. 23, 2026.David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesDETROIT — American consumers are hitting a fork in the road when it comes to the U.S. automotive industry. Affluent buyers are purchasing new vehicles at increasingly higher prices, while lower-income ones are continuing to drive used models.This trend is a growing concern for auto executives and feeds into worries that U.S. consumers are facing a “K-shaped” economy, where the wealthy keep seeing gains while those who have lower incomes struggle.”We have a different vehicle buyer today than we had just a few years ago,” Cox Automotive senior economist Charlie Chesbrough said Thursday during an auto analyst event. “The key takeaway here is that we’re seeing the average buyer here is much more affluent.”Cox reports that the share of new-car buyers with incomes of less than $100,000 has dropped from 50% in 2020 to 37% last year, representing millions of lost sales. On the other end of the spectrum, the share of buyers with incomes of more than $200,000 has grown from 18% to 29% during that timeframe.The shift has occurred as MSRP, or manufacturer’s suggested retail price, hit an average of $51,000 in 2025, according to Cox, and as buyers are also dealing with higher insurance costs and inflation. Consumer sentiment, meanwhile, is at recessionary levels.[embedded content]New-car sales were at record levels of more than 17 million prior to 2020 but have experienced mixed results since, ending 2025 with 16.3 million sales. Brand-new vehicles have never been for the majority of U.S. consumers, but automakers have increasingly been pricing millions of Americans out, including by cutting entry-level vehicle lines such as small cars.”We’re now relying on the extremely wealthy to generate the sales,” Mark Barrott, a partner at consulting firm Plante Moran, said during the Thursday event. “That’s a structural problem from an affordability perspective.”Barrott said U.S. sales aren’t hitting records but that they’re still pretty good compared with historical levels. Automotive executives may begin taking more notice if the market conditions shrink due to buyers getting priced out, he added.”It’s not unrealistic to think that in the next two or three years we could get to that kind of level, and then this really starts to hurt the [automaker …
