Vehicle Prices Are About To Soar Thanks To Hurricane Ida

Hurricane Ida's rath was not only felt in Louisiana, the storm wreaked havoc all the way up to the Northeast.

Ida caused widespread flooding from the Louisiana coast to the Northeast. You might be wondering what does this have to do with the cost of cars and trucks? Well, hundreds of thousands of vehicles were flooded during the storm. Not only personal vehicles but commercial vehicles and vehicles sitting on car dealer lots all along Ida's path.

The car industry was already strained before Hurricane Ida, and now with all the damage that the storm caused, the demand for vehicles will be too great for the car manufacturers to keep up with. Now with Hurricane Nicholas hitting the Texas coast that adds yet another problem for people needing new vehicles.

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New and used car prices soared this summer when inventory levels were extremely tight all across the country at car dealerships. A shortage of computer chips to put in cars also slowed production down and the manufacturers could never meet the selling demand.

Hurricane Ida has simultaneously knocked out hundreds of thousands of cars on the road that will need to be replaced.

Patrick Olsen, the Executive Editor of CarFax, told CNN:

A car that has been through a flood is basically rotting from the inside out. Anytime you get mud or silt in the connections it can create a short in system, which can cause a car to stall while driving.

We saw the same thing happen in 2017 when Hurricane Harvey destroyed more than 500,000 cars in Texas alone. The new and used car prices soared as people needed to replace their flooded vehicles and the prices remained sky-high for months after the storm passed.

Experts fear that even though there were fewer cars damaged during Hurricane Ida, they believe the already tight inventory of vehicles in the United States will drive prices even higher than we saw after the devastation of Hurricane Harvey.