Background
I am a big car enthusiast. More importantly, some of my favorite types of cars are "affordable" hot hatchbacks that are known for combining speed, driving dynamics, and practicality all into one package. The issue however is that in today's new car market, hot hatches which are desired by many enthusiasts tend to have additional dealership markups due to high demand and low supply. While enthusiast car's have always faced the dilemma of high demand and low supply, the rise of dealership markups was not as prevalant until during/after the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic many automakes faced supply chain issues resulting in all cars (not just enthusiast models) to face a similar pattern of low supply and high demand. As a result the practice of additional dealership markups on new vehicles is a new norm which is likely to stay.
Guiding Question(s)
Are brand new enthusiast vehicles sold by dealerships in the United States more likely to be subjected to an additional price markup than their equivalent non enthusiast trims of the same Make/Model?
Methods
To attempt to respond to the guiding question, this analysis will be looking into the Honda Civic Type-R (my personal favorite hot hatch) and exploring data from online listings of brand new Honda Civic Type-R's for sale in the United States.
The data source we will be using has been acquired through a popular website which lists both new and used cars for sale. In order to retrieve this data, the original anticipated method was to use BeautifulSoup to scrape the website for listings. However, this method was soon replaced with simply calling the website's API to fetch a JSON response with desired listing. The motivation behind choosing this route was due to BeautifulSoup not working as intended since the website was a Single Page Application which fecthed data asynchronously. As a result when fetching the HTML, the listing(s) data was not yet present. As a result, the method of fetching the data through an API for a JSON response was chosen instead.
The data from the API has been filtered through parameters defined by the request. In our request, we specifically searched for brand new 2024 model year Honda Civic Type-R's that were currently avalible for sale (as of 5/10/2024) nationwide.
Considerations:
The listings will likely be for car's that are already on dealership lots waiting for a buyer. A standard practice for enthusiast car models is often a vehicle may already be sold before it even reaches a dealership's lot. When this happens, a deal/agreement is usually worked out ahead of time between the buyer and seller on an agreed upon price that is found to be acceptable to both parties. As a result, one could argue online listings may tend to reflect a higher than average selling price since while there is an anticipated demand, the existance of it being an unsold unit may be reflective of potential reasons why a buyer may not be interested in purchasing. We will explore this hypothesis later on through analyzing vehicle price changes and days since listed for sale.
Another consideration is that the Manufactured Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) differs based on the packages/options selected for each specific vehicle. Data regarding each vehicle's specific packages/options was not avalible within our dataset, however through the official Honda of America website the price for a brand new 2024 Honda Civic Type-R is between 44,795 USD and 52,403 USD. An additonal 1095 USD shold also be taken into consideration for mandatory Destination & Handling Fees for each vehicle.
Note these figures are estimated from the base price with no options selected to a fully-loaded model with every avalible package and premium paint colors