It is now. The June U.S. new car sales stats are in and we can see some definite general trends. Newsbusters.org busts some chops for us Inside Baseball auto folk. Chrysler is the biggest loser, shedding five almost six percent market share in the last two years. It would look a LOT more if this chart was chronicling retail sales; some ChryCo models are so fleet it Hertz. As ToMoCo’s also holding the line on incentives, and doesn’t want to look like the bad guy during Motown’s meltdown, they’re probably OK (ish) with a steady 25 percent. Ford gets a big ass bump and surprise! GM is doing better than it was two years ago. (So much for ex-CEO Wagoner’s “bankruptcy will kill us” meme.) Still, one wonders who’s going to get the goodies as Chrysler continues to tank, and GM follows suit.
What I find interesting is that the biggest drop in sales, both in absolute numbers and in percentage, happened between dec 07 and june 08.
Would everybody in Detroit have the comfy-cozies over this if Hyundai and Kia were included?
How about a graph comparing the incentives being offered by all the car companies? The last one I saw had Honda/Toyota offering around $1.5K while the domestics were around $3.5K. After all, a sale doesn’t help much if you’re losing lots of money on it.
This is an odd comparison, looking at market share for 4 of the top 5 market participants. And where is Honda — they sell a lot more cars than Chrysler, you know…
Who will get the goodies? — H&H of course. Honda and Hyundai, not the bagels.
As one who believes that the woes of Detroit can be firmly placed in the lap of management, I’m watching Ford’s phoenix with great amusement. None of these companies had any shortage of skilled workers, good engineers or great product planners, but all were afflicted with too many accountants posing as “managers”.
Counting beans six ways from Sunday does not increase the number of beans or have any affect whatsoever on the quality of those beans. When you arrive at the “brand management” level, you know you’ve run out of product.
The column in the lower far right is the spooky one.
OUCH…
Interesting reading in “Part 2” as well. It’s possible that a year from now we’ll be talking about how the Fiesta enabled Ford to overtake Honda in the US car-selling bidness. Also, GM dropping below Ford in light trucks is huge given that traditionally Ford always struggled to stay ahead of the Chevy brand alone. It looks as if Obama can’t actually perform miracles after all.
Honda sold 100,420 vehicles in the US in June 2009. Chrysler only move 68,297. The term “Big 4” is misleading if Chrysler is included in the list.
Also, for all the Hyundai is gaining ground yakkety-yak, they still only did 37,943 units in June.
Zoom-Zoom Mazda? A paltry 13,729.
Saab: 779. Ouch.
The WSJ’s data center for auto sales is pretty darn impressive, and doesn’t require a subscription:
http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3022-autosales.html
BTW, Newsbusters.org is hardly a non-partisan source.
Tracking incentives might be useful, but if we do we should also track increases in MSRP. Several manufacturers have been progressively bumping up MSRP over the last year.