Edmunds Price Index (EPI) Shows SUV Buyers are Getting Great Deals During Gas Price Hike
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Edmunds Price Index (EPI) Shows SUV Buyers are Getting Great Deals During Gas Price Hike
SANTA MONICA, CALIF. - June 15, 2004 - Edmunds.com, the premier online resource for automotive information, reported today that the Edmunds Price Index for new vehicles (EPI-N) (January 2002 = 100) decreased 0.8% from 100.2 in April to 99.4 in May.
Edmunds.com found that this decrease was primarily the result of the significant 2.0% drop in the indices for both the large SUV and the luxury SUV segments. This is the third month in a row in which SUV prices declined. Large cars experienced the largest increase, 0.9%, followed by midsize cars at 0.7%.
"Consumers are driving hard bargains on SUVs, forcing manufacturers to offer a record amount of incentives on the vehicles and pushing down net price even further through assertive shopping," said Dr. Jane Liu, Vice President of Data Analysis for Edmunds.com. "Neither automakers nor dealers are earning the significant profits from SUV sales to which they have been accustomed, and gas prices are to blame." Similar in purpose to the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the EPI-N measures the average changes in retail prices for new vehicles with fixed options over time in order to analyze trends. Edmunds.com also calculates and reports a wide range of data including transaction prices and net prices of vehicles by country of origin, manufacturer, make, model and vehicle segment.
About Edmunds
Edmunds.com is the premier online resource for automotive information. Its comprehensive set of data, tools and services, including Edmunds.com True Market Value® pricing, is generated by Edmunds Data Services and is licensed to third parties. For example, the company supplies over 800,000 pages of content for the auto sections of AOL and NYTimes.com, provides weekly data to Automotive News and delivers monthly data reports to Wall Street analysts. Edmunds.com was named "best car research" site by Forbes ASAP, has been selected by consumers as the "most useful Web site" according to every J.D. Power and Associates New Autoshopper.com StudySM and was ranked first in the Survey of Car-Shopping Web Sites as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company is headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif. and maintains a satellite office outside Detroit.
