Used Car Market Trends Coverage: Analyzing Carvana and CarMax
Intro:
The origins of this blog and company are Carvana data tracking, so it’s only natural to include some used car market coverage in our weekly blogs.
As we currently offer alternative data coverage for CVNA/KMX via our website, we thought it would make sense to also provide generic coverage of used car market trends. Our newly available Used Car Coverage dataset covers Price/Make/Model/Trim/Year trends for Carvana and CarMax as well as combined. We believe this is helpful not only to clients of those data sets, but more generally to those interested in the used auto market. Our goal is to provide high quality information into a wide variety of areas, hence this post.
At our website you can find a free sample sheet that show’s the types of things we cover, which will also be discussed below. With any questions, feel free to reply to this email or toss an email to Kyle@Clarity-Markets.com. Cheers.
Used Car Trends: Price
To preface, the used car market has been unusually volatile over the past month, particularly on price. While our combined coverage only starts in 2025, we can use CVNA data from 2024 to show the relative stability during that time frame. Below is a graph of CVNA weekly ASP’s during 2024 (we exclude Christmas/Thanksgiving weeks due to low volumes)
The average price consumers paid in 2024 was ~$25,138 per vehicle before taxes/fees/financing. At the lows of tax season it dipped to $24,219, at the summer highs it peaked at $25,931. The largest sequential change was a 3% move in charge of $774, while the total change over the entire year was a mere ~$438 or ~1.8%. This was a remarkably stable period as in 2023 we saw prices go from the ~$22-23k range in Q1 to highs of $26k in Q2 and falling back to $24k in Q4.
2025 is shaping up to be another volatile year thus far. As of yesterday, 5/1, the average price of a vehicle on:
Carvana.com was ~$25,849
Carmax.com was ~$26,002
One month ago on 4/1 the prices were:
Carvana.com was ~$25,028
Carmax.com was ~$26,332
Two months ago on 3/1 the prices were:
Carvana.com was ~$23,798
Carmax.com was ~$27,174
For CVNA we started 4/1 with a trailing week ASP of $23,435 and as of 5/1 it was $25,753. Last year the difference over the same period was a mere $400 vs $2,300 now!
2025 prices are all over the place and Carmax/Carvana have seen totally different trends, so what’s up?
March through May is always a whacky time for car sales. We have Easter interruptions, we have giant tax season impacts, we occasionally get some random winter storms, etc. Typically we’d expect price to creep up through April as tax season purchasers tend to be looking for a different type of vehicle than average purchasers throughout the rest of the year.
For example, while CVNA’s inventory wide pricing has seen ~$800 in price hikes over the past month, on a per SKU basis the changes aren’t as drastic. The Chevrolet Malibu 2023 has been the top inventory vehicle for a awhile now and ended April at $18,613 vs a starting price of $18,860, a decrease!
The intra-month data was a lot more messy. On 4/9, a week after Trump’s tariff announcements, we saw prices spike up to $19,337 for the same Malibu. This ~$400 price increase was similar across all SKU’s which is a very rapid change in inventory pricing. Sold ASP’s can be more volatile as delivery times can vary, so the ASP on a given today contains a blend of prices from the past 1-2 weeks. Inventory prices tend to be much more stable on a per SKU basis, so a $400 change in a week is highly unusual, especially upwards.
CarMax is interesting as they instead saw inventory prices fall in early April following tariff uncertainty, and have raised prices through the latter parts of April while Carvana tapered off their hikes. Inventory wide prices went from:
$26,332 (April 1st) → $25,839 (April 9th) → $26,000 (May 1st)
A great way to compare the two is by using our Mix Adjusted Price comparison. We can compare vehicles of the same Make/Model/Trim/Year across both sites to get an idea of how price was handled. As both have different inventory compositions, we present this metric in its unweighted form as well as weighted for CVNA/KMX specific inventory compositions. We calculate the price difference using CVNA price less KMX price, so a negative number means CVNA is cheaper.
April 1 Price Delta: -$165 (unweighted), -$516 (CVNA weight), -$270 (KMX weight)
April 9 Price Delta: -$83 (unweighted), -$400 (CVNA weight), -$183 (KMX weight)
May 1 Price Delta: -$512 (unweighted), -$861 (CVNA weight), -$616 (KMX weight)
The above basically means that CVNA raised prices faster than KMX initially, then on a relative basis has lowered them significantly such that if you picked a random vehicle on Carvana.com, it’s likely $860 cheaper than the equivalent vehicle on Carmax vs just $400 a few weeks ago.
What this also highlights is how each company to some extent plays to their own strengths with inventory. Since the unweighted price delta is much lower than CVNA weighted, we can see that CVNA is specializing in SKU’s where they have a relative price advantage (chicken or the egg?). We can also tell that for very long tail SKU’s, there isn’t as much of an advantage for CVNA on price. For example, CVNA has about 571 vehicles >$50k in price where KMX has the same SKU (~112 SKU’s). These are your Corvette Stingray’s, your Porsche Macan’s, higher end SUV’s, etc. For these vehicles, you’d actually be paying ~$1,000 more on average to Carvana than to CarMax.
Some vehicles have obscene price discrepancies between the two sites. If you were interested in a Tesla for example, be prepared to pay ~$1,500 more on CarMax. For a Rivian? $3,661 more on Carvana.
The trends based on Year are also quite interesting:
CarMax actually has a price advantage for older vehicles, whereas CVNA does significantly better with newer vehicles. Why is that? Hard to say.
Hopefully this article was a helpful snippet when thinking about vehicle prices. In future articles we can cover more general inventory management trends with SKU’s, dive in to additional analysis based on our data, and more. If there’s anything you’re particularly interested in, feel free to shoot me an email, and subscribe below.