Prices of new & used vehicles, insurance, gasoline, maintenance & repairs, parts & accessories, and fees.

By Wolf Richter for WOLF STREET.

Americans spend a lot of money on the ownership costs of motor vehicles, and inflation has hit them over the head in recent years. These costs of vehicle ownership weigh nearly 15% in the Consumer Price Index. They include the purchase price of new and used vehicles, the price of motor fuel, auto insurance, maintenance and repairs, auto parts and equipment (parts, tires, accessories, oil, coolant, and fluids), and motor vehicle fees (state registration and license fees, parking fees, tolls, and other fees).

Each category of costs experienced its own inflation spike. They didn’t happen in lockstep. The first out the gate were new and used vehicle prices; they exploded between mid-2020 and mid-2022 and then hit a ceiling. Vehicle maintenance and repair services rose steadily through 2021 and then exploded, and they continue to surge. Auto insurance exploded from 2022 through 2024 but then hit a ceiling and stalled. Motor vehicle fees rose steadily but then suddenly spiked late last year. And motor fuel prices spiked from late 2020 through mid-2022, then plunged, and now there’s the brutal re-spike. We’ll look at each one of them.

The CPI for motor vehicle maintenance and repairs jumped by 1.25% in March from February and by 6.1% year-over-year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since January 2020, those prices exploded by 50%. These are services – parts and equipment are in a separate category, see further below – and these services are driven by the cost of labor (which surged) and profits (which also surged). The chart shows the index for the price level (not the percentage change), seasonally adjusted.

The CPI for motor vehicle insurance has been flat to down since the peak in mid-2025. In March it was essentially unchanged from February, and up only 0.8% from a year ago.

But since January 2020, the index has spiked by 56%. Insurers, which got hit by spiking repair costs and exploding used-vehicle prices (replacement costs) in 2020-2022, raised their premiums to keep up with cost increases, plus some. But recently, those increases stalled.

So there is little inflation – the rate of change of prices – in auto insurance currently. But due to the inflation in prior years, auto insurance has become hugely expensive and continues to be hugely expensive.

The CPI for motor vehicle parts and equipment jumped by 0.7% in March from February. Year-over-year, and from three years ago (March 2023), it was up by 3.9%.

But since January 2020, the index has soared by 27%, most of it in 2021 and 2022.

The CPI for motor vehicle fees rose by 0.42% in March and by 3.6% year-over-year, including the freak spike in January.

Since 2020, the cost of fees has risen by 14%, relatively tame, compared to the other costs here.

The CPI for used vehicles had exploded by 54% from mid-2020 through early 2022, and then plunged through mid-2024 when it bottomed out.

Not seasonally adjusted, it ticked up in March but was down 3.2% year-over-year (blue line). Seasonally adjusted, it dipped further in May and was down 3.2% year-over-year (red).

Since mid-2020, the used vehicle CPI is still up by 29%, despite the plunge since mid-2022. Used vehicles remain very expensive, and the industry has had a very hard time making price increases stick. So maybe this spring they get their chance when consumers come in with their big tax refunds.

In preparation for this hoped-for onslaught of down-payment-wielding customers, dealers have already started bidding up prices at wholesale auctions where they buy their inventory.

The CPI for new vehicles inched up 0.1% in March from April, and by 0.47% year-over-year, and is below where it had been at the peak in mid-2023.

After the 21% price surge from mid-2020 through mid-2023, new vehicle prices hit a ceiling, they’re too expensive, and demand is not strong at those prices, and any price increases keep getting replaced with discounts and incentives to make sales happen.

New vehicle sales remain well below their pre-pandemic levels and in 2025 were just a hair higher than they’d been 40 years ago, in 1986 (my ugly charts by automaker, but there were some winners too):

The CPI for gasoline spiked by 21% seasonally adjusted and by 25% not seasonally adjusted in March from February.

The US is a big exporter of gasoline, and has a big trade surplus in petroleum products, including gasoline, and its supply is not dependent on the Strait of Hormuz. Gasoline prices at the pump spiked because energy speculation is global and instant, though the gasoline was already in underground tanks or had been refined and purchased well before the war in Iran began. And what consumers paid for was a huge spike in profit margins of the gasoline retailers and refiners (and the crack spread surged in the first half of March).

Year-over-year, the CPI for gasoline spiked by 18.9%.

The CPI for “private transportation,” which combines the above categories into one index, spiked by 4.6% in March from February, to a new record, surpassing for the first time June 2022, driven by the spike in gasoline prices in March.

Year-over-year, it was also up by 4.6% thanks to the spike in March. In February, it had still been down from a year ago, due to the year-over-year declines of used-vehicle and gasoline prices.

Since January 2020, it has spiked by 36%, that’s about the increase of the overall cost of ownership of a motor vehicle in the car and truck culture of America.

 

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