The 2021 Honda Ridgeline was redesigned to give it a more rugged appearance.
One thing that can be attributed to the pandemic was a surge in online car shopping. This was the year that buying cars, just like buying everything else, went online in a big way.
Used car shopping website Carvana sold 39% more cars in the third quarter of 2020 than in 2019. Vroom, another online used car seller, sold 59% more cars in that same period.
These companies' sales were already rising before, but "the pandemic has just accelerated all of that, maybe to the tune of several years,'' said Carvana CEO Ernest Garcia.
At the start of 2020, JD Power began surveying new car shoppers about their online experiences. Between January and April, when lockdowns were in place in much of the United States, the number of car shoppers who selected a vehicle online increased by 63%, while the percentage of shoppers getting credit approval online more than doubled.
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Online car shopping has far from taken over the new car shopping business, though. Even with those big shifts online, paperwork-intensive parts of the process are, in particular, still being done mostly in person.
For instance, despite that big increase, only 20% of new car shoppers got credit approval online in April, according to JD Power's data. And only 15% of car shoppers got an appraised value for their trade-in vehicle online.
Improved digital processes for those sorts of things will help, said Christopher Sutton, JD Power's vice president for automotive retail, as will more marketing of online systems by dealers and automakers.
"One thing that we did see that, I think was very encouraging, is that the customers who went through the digital experience did report a better experience on balance," he said.
