The car market has been particularly active this year. It is hard to say if that is due to pent-up demand from the COVID-19 pandemic-driven shuttering of dealers. It certainly has caused more people to shop and buy cars online, which helped dealers weather the storm. People also may be tempted by the attractive features that new cars did not have just a few years ago. These include complex safety systems and infotainment services.

As demand has risen, so have prices. These price increases also have been triggered by low car inventory. The semiconductor chips used in car electrics systems have been in short supply. Many car manufacturers have had to shut down assembly lines. The big publicly traded corporations in the industry have had to cut back numbers their investors thought would be robust just a few months ago.
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iSeeCars has issued its August report on car demand. It looked at the sales of over 900,000 new and used cars (model years 2016 to 2020 for used cars). iSeeCars Executive Analyst Karl Brauer commented:

The microchip shortage is showing no signs of slowing down as major automakers continue to halt production, leading to lower and sometimes scarce inventory levels, especially for the most in-demand vehicles.

The standard industry term for determining car model demand at the dealer level is “average days to sell.” In August, across the industry for new cars, that period was 26 days. New cars are selling over a week faster than in July, when the average was 35 days.

Some cars had much higher average days to sell. At the top of the list was the Acura TLX. Acura is the luxury division of Honda, launched in the United States in 1986 to compete with high-end German imports, as well as Lincoln and Cadillac. The TLX is Acura’s sports sedan. The average price of the model is $46,316. While it generally gets good reviews from car research firms and the automotive media, sedans in general are out of style in America has demand has shifted to sport utility vehicles, pickups and crossovers.

These are the average days to sell of the 10 slowest-selling new cars in America:

• Acura TLX (88.7)
• Jeep Compass (88.1)
• INFINITI Q50 (85.1)
• Lincoln Corsair (84.4)
• Nissan Altima (82.9)
• Alfa Romeo Giulia (79.9)
• Buick Encore (78.7)
• Infiniti QX50 (77.8)
• Jeep Renegade (72.4)
• Acura ILX (72.0)

Click here to see which is the fastest-selling car in America.

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