as a larger and larger portion of americans are discovering, without a whole shitload of well paid idiots out there, buying new cars every 3-5 years, the used market contracts significantly.

and now that it's obvious EVs are the future for individual transport, rational people started hanging on longer than average to their existing combustion car to wait for the used/affordable EV market to materialize.

the used car market is now so squeezed, used car prices can be decoupled from reality just because people still need a car in this car dependent shithole.

add in the broader unstable economic outlook and nobody wants to make any large purchases unless they absolutely half to, so all the dealerships can do to juice sales is start issuing insane loans with horrible terms to the biggest broke idiots they can find to try and move the needle until the next quarter, when they assume the slump will be over.

its a perfect storm of how capitalism turns anything into a highly profitable* disaster (* assuming the feds come in and underwrite the insane risk).