Podcast: Sales, supply, promotions dominate Powersports Finance Summit 2025 discussions

Hello everyone, and welcome to The Road Map from Auto Finance News, the nation’s leading newsletter on automotive lending and leasing since 1996. It is Monday, September 29th, and I’m Aidan Bush. First, I’d like to thank our sponsor for this week’s podcast, The Work Number by Equifax. This week, our team was in Columbus, Oh for Power Sports Finance Summit 2025, where we heard from dealers, lenders and OEMs in the power sports industry. One key take away we really saw was this growing concern around tariffs. In fact, National Power Sports Auctions named it the number one issue for manufacturers at a presentation they had there. Part of that has come from the 50% steel and aluminum tariffs, which MPA said is especially proven tricky, as if manufacturers cannot prove where that metal comes from, that tariff can rise to 200%. In one instance, MPA saw motorcycle keys that typically cost about $27.00 jumped to 81. $1 after manufacturers couldn’t identify where the metal in them was sourced. Those tariffs, though, while sort of causing these price cost increases as far as parts and the actual vehicles themselves, may help dealers sell used inventory that isn’t yet susceptible to those price increases.
Alongside those tariff concerns did, though, come tighter margins and slower sales. Powersports lender Octane noted promotion spend is more aggressive than typical, and yet the promotional rates of 2025 are higher in some instances than standard loan rates in 2019. The summit was pretty comprehensive, so I’ll turn it over to Truth to talk about some of the regulatory takeaways as well as dealers hunts for microtrend. Thanks, Aiden. So one of the biggest takeaways for me from the Pilot Sports Summit was that dealers are leaning on microtrends to inform their inventory decisions as sales and consumer confidence trends downwards. Microtrends are by definition short-lived consumer trends that often gain popularity through social media. Rapidly before fading kind of just as quickly. One panelist by the name of Michael Campbell, who is the finance and insurance manager at Destination Cycles, said that in his store, consumer interests in certain ATV models recently spiked, which actually caused him to quote. UN quote order heavy on that specific model and now he only has one left. Some other ways that dealers identify micro trends are by monitoring consumer demand, monitoring regional trends and running lead reports for various dealerships within a larger dealer group. For more on micro trends, listeners can check out my article titled Power Sports Dealers and. For more on microtrends, listeners can check out my article titled Power Sports Dealers Turn to Microtrends as Sales Fall. But to continue on the topic of how social media shows up in power sports, the audience was a little shocked during the compliance panel when several experts highlighted the very real and tangible impacts that traditional media and social media can have on the risk that lenders and dealers. Might face from a regulatory standpoint. The panelists named a couple of instances where traditional media, such as news publications stories, prompted further investigations by regulators and named some platforms that regulators comb regularly. Which are also platforms where viral comments and videos have resulted in adverse regulatory impacts such as Reddit and TikTok. For more on the intersection of compliance and media, interested listeners should check out my article titled Regulators on TikTok.
Dealers, lenders need to know the risk. Back to you, Aiden. Thank you, Truth. Just to kind of wrap up some of the other stories we saw from last week, RV manufacturer Thor Industries saw declining sales in its fiscal 2025 with mixed shipments and promotional spending. Of note, it’s promotional and rebate liabilities dropped both year over year and month over month, according to its SEC filing, which was interesting. Sort of in context of some of that promotional discussion we had earlier, interest rate relief could provide a major tailwind for Thor and other retailers, which we also heard at Power Sports Finance Summit. Another thing we heard from Power Sports Finance Summit, consumer confidence has fallen to some of the lowest levels ever recorded, according to a black book presentation. They saw prices of every major power sports segment fall in quarter three and month over month in September. And a similar thing we saw in Marine. The dealers were reluctant to order inventory despite a decline in supply in August as registration stepped 9% year over year and fell for pretty much every major Marine. Segment That’s all for this time, but thank you for joining us on the roadmap and be sure to follow us on X and LinkedIn. Registration is also open for Auto Finance Summit 2025 in the fall. As always, we will see you online at autofinancenews.net and thank you again to our sponsor Equifax lenders who leverage income and employment verification. through Equifax as the work number, see a 48% higher likelihood of loans closing. We’ll see you online and here next time. Thank you again.
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