With affordability a prime concern in 2026, AutoNation this year will seek to acquire more, and more-affordable, used vehicles for resale — without going too far downmarket, CEO Michael Manley said in a Feb. 6 earnings call.
“I think this year, we’re going to be, as we have always done, focused on affordability, frankly. You know, we all know what’s happened with net transaction prices over the last few years and how that’s impacted monthly payments. And it’s been a topic of discussion both on our calls, but with other people’s calls as well,” Manley said in the conference call discussing the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings.
Reflecting slower industry sales in Q4, AutoNation reported its new-vehicle unit sales were down 10% compared with the same quarter a year ago, while used-vehicle sales were down 5%. Manley said a drop in electric-vehicle sales was responsible for half of AutoNation’s overall decline in new-vehicle sales.
EV sales fell industry-wide in the fourth quarter, after the federal tax break for EV purchases expired at the end of Q3. Across the industry, pull-ahead EV sales in Q3 exaggerated the drop in Q4.
For all of 2025, AutoNation new-vehicle sales were up 2% versus 2024, whereas used-vehicle volume was up 1%. Numbers are on a same-store basis.
Manley said in the call that in 2026, used vehicles offer AutoNation an opportunity to address affordability, but he doesn’t want to go too far downscale in sourcing used units, out of concern for the AutoNation brand image.
“I think we performed really well in $40,000-plus vehicles. We saw growth in that segment, and it’s a segment that I think we’re very strong in,” he said. “Where we did not perform, really, to-marketwas in that sub-$20,000 price range. And some of that is because when we think about vehicles we want to sell to our customers, many of those vehicles don’t fit the profile that we want to put in the marketplace. And I think chasing volume of a poor used car is not what we want to do for the brand.”
A price range below $30,000 is more like it, Manley said. “But how do we do that and get the right inventory? That is a very, very competitive marketplace, as you can imagine, and this is where we’ve got to leverage our scale and our reach,” he said.
For example, a big group like AutoNation takes in a lot of trade-ins, and it can shift used-vehicle inventory between dealerships or even between regions of the country, depending on customer demand.
Like its competitors, AutoNation wants to self-source as many used vehicles as possible from trade-ins, lease returns, purchases from its own service lanes and direct purchases from non-customers. Those self-sources are more economical for the dealership than buying at wholesale auctions. In 2025, AutoNation self-sourced “more than 90%” of its used-vehicle inventory, the company said.
“We’ve been able to offset some of that cost pressure through mix changes as well, in terms of how we source vehicles,” Manley said. “And I think that’s something that we have the ability to do because we operate a very, very sizable new-car sales organization, and that is a great and often undervalued channel because it is still the best channel to source excellent used-car vehicles.”
