You thought you saw one once, didn’t you? A hint of blue trim was visible in the distance; some unique badging, as well.

But then when you Googled the images at home later, you realized that no, the front fascia was too normal. You saw the ninth-generation Honda Accord’s hybrid model, not the plug-in hybrid.

Indeed, spotting a Honda Accord Plug-In Hybrid is now statistically not all that different from catching a glimpse of a Porsche 918 Spyder. You roar ahead, trying to get a closer look, but it’s already pulled into Jerry Seinfeld’s exclusive parking garage. Or in the case of the Plug-In Hybrid, a Honda executive’s enclosed charging station.

As if Honda dealers haven’t had a hard enough time stocking Accord Hybrids, the Accord Plug-In Hybrid was so rarely built that only 1,030 have been sold in the United States since the car arrived in January 2013. That’s an average of 36 sales per month. No wonder Honda is, wait for it, pulling the plug.  Read More >

Hyundai’s U.S. operations produced record sales in calendar year 2014 and in the process outsold Kia – which also reported record sales last year – by an average of 12,000 sales per month. That gap was narrower than in 2013, when Hyundai typically outsold Kia by more than 15,000 sales per month.

But after outselling its Kia partner by 6,206 units in January of this year, 8475 units in February, 16,248 in March (Hyundai Motor America’s best ever month), and 14,727 units in April, Hyundai’s favourable gap narrowed to only 1,177 units in May.  Read More >

In each of the last five months, General Motors has failed to sell more than 1,800 copies of the CTS. Sub-2K CTS sales months are unheard-of. Even in 2012, when CTS volume slid 15%, Cadillac averaged 3,914 CTS sales per month in the United States and never fell below 2,300.

CTS volume dropped 31% in 2013 and another 4% in 2014. However, over the course of the last two calendar years, Cadillac averaged 2,644 CTS sales per month and never slid below the 2,000-unit mark.

In 2015, the CTS has been hit even harder. Read More >

Four out of every ten new vehicles sold in May 2015 in the United States by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles were Jeeps, ten years after Jeep accounted for just 20% of Chrysler Group’s U.S. sales.

The automaker’s 4% year-over-year improvement was powered in large part by Jeep’s 13% gain. FCA volume improved by 8,000 units despite a 58% decrease in minivan volume. How’d they do it?

Read More >

Through the first five months of 2015, the Toyota Camry opened up a lead of nearly 36,000 units over the Nissan Altima in the race to end the year as America’s best-selling midsize car.

Aside from popularity, the Camry and Altima – as well as nearly every intermediate car on the market – share another factor in common: their sales are declining. Read More >

In May 2015, for the fifth consecutive month, more than one-third of the new vehicles sold in the United States were SUVs and crossovers. Year-over-year, the share of the market earned by utility vehicles increased from slightly less than 32% to slightly more than 34%, a gain equal to 50,000 extra sales in a market which saw passenger car volume tumble by nearly 30,000 units.

Led by the Honda CR-V, which was actually down 1% in May 2015, the U.S. SUV/crossover market was strengthened by new products last month. May was the second full month for the Jeep Renegade in what turned out to be the highest-volume month in the Jeep brand’s history. Not only did Jeep sell more than 20,000 Wranglers for the first time ever, not only did Jeep break the Cherokee’s sales record, but they also sold 4,416 copies of the Renegade. Read More >

General Motors earned 17.9% of the U.S. auto industry’s sales volume in May 2015, a drop from 18.5% one month ago but a slight improvement compared with May 2014, when GM’s market share stood at 17.7%.

In May 2015, GM’s U.S. sales grew at a 3% clip, twice the rate of improvement posted by the overall auto industry. GM’s gains came mainly as a result of improved pickup truck volume and a strong month for Lambda crossovers. Read More >

Midsize pickups have increased their share of the overall pickup truck category by around four percentage points since GM launched the second-generation Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon.

Compared with a period when the twins weren’t on sale, the volume sent the direction of midsize pickups jumped 50% over the first four months of 2015. That gain of 39,000 units wasn’t simply down to the GM twins, either, as the class-leading Toyota Tacoma is growing faster than the overall pickup truck category. Read More >

As recently as 2009, Dodge was the sixth-best-selling auto brand in the United States.

But through the first four months of 2015, Dodge is the tenth-best-selling auto brand in America. Granted, Dodge volume has fallen 15% year-over-year, but the real reason for Dodge’s lower ranking is that the Dodge of today isn’t the Dodge of yesterday.  Read More >

Audi USA sold 16,827 new vehicles in April 2015, an increase of 1174 units compared with Audi’s previous best-ever April in 2014, and the 52nd consecutive month in which Audi U.S. volume has broken the previous monthly record.

Year-over-year, Audi sales have increased in each of the last 66 months, a streak stretching back to November 2009.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.

Compared with the prior month, General Motors’ U.S. market share increased by more than two percentage points to 18.5% in April 2015. Toyota’s trio of brands lost slightly more than half a percentage point. American Honda jumped from 8.2% to 8.9%.

Nissan and Infiniti dropped by nearly two percentage points as the automaker suffered its normal, anticipated, severe drop-off in April volume. The auto industry’s size decreased 6% between March and April; Nissan USA’s sales fell 24% during the same period.

Read More >

With 29% and 30% of their U.S. sales coming from pickup trucks, respectively, General Motors and Ford Motor Company fall from the top two positions to the second and third when auto manufacturer sales are compared without pickups.

Toyota, therefore, becomes the top dog with 507,000 non-pickup sales through the first-quarter of 2015, 21,000 more cars, vans, SUVs, and crossovers than General Motors.

Excluding Frontiers, Titans, and Ridgelines doesn’t change the fact that Nissan and Infiniti are still outselling Honda and Acura. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles nearly pulls level with Ford MoCo when the Ram and dominant F-Series, America’s best-selling vehicle line, are left out of the equation. Read More >

Commercial van sales are on the rise in the United States. But of greater interest than the improvements – total sales jumped 14% to 356,814 units in 2014 and are up 26% to 87,866 year-to-date – is the constant change in the category. Read More >

Not surprisingly, one of only a couple automakers with an SUV-only auto brand is enjoying record sales at that SUV brand in an era of booming utility vehicle sales.

At this stage in 2013, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles/Chrysler Group was selling more cars in the United States than SUVs and crossovers. Those figures flipped one year later and became even more disparate in the first-quarter of 2015. Read More >

GM’s U.S. market share declined from 18.4% in February 2015 to 16.1% the following month as the automaker’s sales slid 2%, year-over-year, in a market which expanded marginally. GM earned 16.7% of the U.S. auto industry’s volume in March 2014.

Compared with February, Toyota, Ford, Hyundai-Kia, and the BMW Group all produced market share improvements worthy of mention. Honda’s share fell slightly from 8.4% to 8.2%; FCA was down from 13.1% in February to 12.8% in March.

The industry’s 1.55M new vehicle sales represented the best March since 2005.

Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures.