Cox is brightening its 2026 outlook with used sales grinding along in the "true grit" category, while September new-vehicle sales pace to a 16.1 million SAAR on 1.33 million units, up 2.6% year over year. The louder story underneath is mix: hybrids are moving at a record clip and it's no longer a Toyota-only game. That's your trade-in tide and your three-years-out supply — if you aren't already comfortable appraising and reconditioning hybrids, the wholesale lanes are about to make you comfortable.

Volkswagen is throwing up to $12,500 at the outgoing ID.4 to clear lots, Hyundai is advertising a Kona SE AWD at $109 a month in select regions, and Subaru just revived a base Impreza that undercuts last year's entry price by nearly $2,000. When a new compact crossover carries a payment that starts with a one, your $19,000 three-year-old version stops looking like the obvious deal. Recheck your book on used EVs specifically — a fire sale on new ID.4s reprices every used one in your market by Monday.

The Federal Reserve took a look at buy-here-pay-here books and found roughly 14% of subprime BHPH balances sitting on weekly or biweekly schedules — which, as the Fed dryly puts it, simply "create more opportunities to miss a payment." Meanwhile VantageScore's August CreditGauge shows average auto loan balances flat and consumer credit holding up better than the doom crowd expected. Translation: your customers can pay, but how you structure the due dates is doing as much work as the down payment. Worth pulling your own delinquency numbers by pay cadence before someone else does it for you.

Stellantis flips on a minimum advertised price policy Oct. 1, barring dealers from advertising Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep or Ram below a set floor — franchise news, but it reshapes the advertised-price landscape every independent competes against on the same search results page. Separately, the FTC is taking public comment on whether to expand its government-and-business impersonation rule to cover platforms that carry the scams, and NICB has teamed with Honk to go after predatory towing, impound and storage fraud. All three are worth a read with your compliance person, not a shrug.