Lithia Motors, Inc. (NYSE:LAD) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Bryan DeBoer: David, it’s Bryan again. I think what we have seeing is it’s quite difficult to buy those cars just like it always has and we have getting less of them through the channel than we typically would. I believe pre-pandemic in our value bucket, we were $14 million to $15 million or 14,000 per unit to 15,000 per unit, okay? So at the 18,000 per unit, that’s a little higher than what we typically would want. But really, it’s a matter of that the cost of the cars are just more expensive. So, unfortunately, affordability is still difficult and even though we have almost a fifth of our sales coming from the nine-year old and older vehicle, it’s not as affordable as it used to be and we try to do everything we can to be able to bring consumers in at all price points.

One other kind of fun little note is, we sold about 8% of our cars that were sustainable, okay, which is pretty cool for the year in BEVs. And even though they have a little more expensive at an average BEV over an ice engine car that we sell is about 50% more expensive on a monthly payment about $900 instead of $600, a $300 more, so kind of fund that is okay that as we learned, but it quickly grew to 7.5%, 8% of our total volume.

Operator: Thank you. I will now turn the floor over to Bryan for closing remarks.

Bryan DeBoer: Excellent. Well, thank you for joining us today and we look forward to updating you on Lithia & Driveway’s first quarter results in April. All the best.

Operator: This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.