August wholesale prices dipped 0.9% while inventory levels drew down, and the interesting wrinkle is that older, lower-priced units are holding value better than the fresh stuff — the buyer has voted with a payment. Cox's Q3 survey has dealers in a split mood: traffic is down, profits and costs look better, and shoppers are shopping monthly payment before they shop anything else. KBRA's state-level ABS work puts the Southeast at the top of the credit-stress table, with four of the five worst 60-day delinquency rates. If you're buying in the Southeast, price for the paper you'll actually get approved, not the book.

Europe put fully electric cars at nearly a quarter of July new-car sales; US EV sales fell about 42%. Volvo read the room and killed the EX40 stateside while spending the money on a gas XC40 refresh instead, and Audi is dangling up to $10,000 off lease buyouts to keep its EVs from coming back to it. That last one matters most to you: manufacturers are paying to keep off-lease electrics out of the wholesale channel, which thins the supply but also tells you exactly what they think those cars are worth at auction.

Jeep is recalling more than 200,000 vehicles over a tire-pressure monitoring fault, Toyota has 10,000 C-HR EVs that can lose power and need a dealer visit, and NHTSA now counts an 11th death tied to banned Chinese airbag inflators. Meanwhile the CARS Rule is gone but the compliance exposure isn't, and NIADA's federal right-to-repair push stalled when the House adjourned. Worth a read on all of it — but the practical move is running open-recall checks before a unit hits the front line, because the inflator story is the kind that follows a VIN forever.

With front-end money squeezed, the trade press is circling the same conclusion: profitability now lives in fixed ops, F&I structure, and the cost of running the store. Two under-the-hood items make the point — dealers who've never had a real IT audit are usually both overpaying and underprotected, and the CSI score you've been chasing is a worse read on customer sentiment than the reviews strangers actually see. On a small lot, both are cheap to fix and expensive to ignore.