Two weeks ago we published a chart that showed GM’s decreasing passenger car emphasis over the last 14 months. Last Saturday, we showed GM’s annual U.S. sales volume by vehicle type. This week, we’re continuing the GM examination with a look at the brand allotment over the last decade.

Aside from the Chrysler Group, no automaker has undergone such a dramatic restructuring during the last decade. The public face of the GM restructuring, apart from the shuttering of dealerships, congressional hearings, and a revolving door of new faces in the executive’s chair, was the dismissal of a number of brands. Hummer, Saturn, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac were killed off. Saab is still kind of a thing, but not GM’s thing. Read More >

GM passenger car volume decreased 15% through the first two months of 2015 in the United States, tumbling by more than 18,000 units, or 21%, in February alone.

With vastly improved U.S. pickup truck volume, steadily growing full-size SUV sales, and growth from the brand’s crossovers, GM was easily able to overcome the car deficit to post a 10% overall sales improvement in America through the end of February. Read More >

Compared with the previous month, GM’s U.S. market share grew by more than half a percentage point to 18.4% in February 2015. During the same month-to-month period, Ford Motor Company’s share slipped by nearly a full percentage point to 14.3%. FoMoCo was joined by Toyota (including its Lexus and Scion sub-brands), Honda, Subaru, and the Volkswagen Group in losing share to FCA, Nissan, and the Korean duo, Hyundai and Kia.

Full brand-by-brand results were published earlier this week. We also published a list of America’s 20 best-selling vehicles through the first two months of 2015.

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

Subaru and Jeep are consistently two of America’s fast-growing auto brands. Aided by expanding portfolios and clearly understood branding, Jeep volume jumped 41% in 2014; Subaru sales shot up 21%.

Are any two auto brands more easily identified with winter than Subaru and Jeep? Read More >

“America’s minivan segment generated only 3.4% of the U.S. auto industry’s new vehicle volume in 2014, down from 5.2% in 2007.”

So said I earlier this week in my review of the updated 2015 Toyota Sienna, the only remaining all-wheel-drive minivan.

The Sienna was America’s top-selling minivan in each of the last three months. And although the accompanying chart displays its official EPA mileage ratings at 16/23 mpg on the city and highway, front-wheel-drive Siennas are rated at 18/25. Forget the 14.4 mpg we saw during our test. Temperatures were brutal, the vehicle spent much of its time idling as we attempted to clear it (along with every other car on the street) of multiple inches of ice, the city streets on which the Sienna spent most of its stay were mostly snow-covered, and the van was fresh off the assembly line.

But could we have reasonably expected more than 16 mpg in city driving? Not according to the EPA. Read More >

With 17.6% of the U.S. market in January 2015, General Motors increased its market share from January 2014’s 16.9% but slid back from December’s 18.2%.

GM car sales slid 7% to account for just 32% of the automaker’s January volume. Light trucks at General Motors – including a pickup range that grew its sales by 42% – jumped 36%.

The big loser? That’d be the Koreans. Hyundai and Kia combined to own 8% of the U.S. market in January 2014, a figure which fell to 7.2% in January 2015. New vehicle sales rose 14% in America last month, year-over-year. Hyundai volume rose to a record-setting January level of 82,804 sales, but the 1% gain severely trailed the industry. Kia sales were up a little more than 3%, although the brand’s car division slid 3% on falling Optima and Cadenza volume.

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

After selling in virtually identical numbers in 2013, light truck sales in the United States overtook car sales in 2014 for the first time since 2011.

Light trucks, a category which encompasses everything from pickups and body-on-frame SUVs to minivans and commercial vans to SUVs and very car-like crossovers, accounted for 52% of U.S. new vehicle volume in 2014, up from 49.9% in 2013. Read More >

The Asociación Mexicana de la Industria Automotriz reported a 7% increase to 1.1 million new vehicle sales in 2014.

Nissan is Mexico’s best-selling auto brand. Sales at the Nissan brand jumped 11% to 291,729 units in 2014. Combined with Infiniti and Renault volume, the Alliance owned 28% of the overall Mexican auto market, up slightly more than a percentage point compared with 2013. Read More >

2014 was a record-setting year for auto sales in Canada, a fitting follow-up to a record-setting twelve-month period one year earlier.

Auto sales in Canada jumped 6% to 1.85 million, an increase of 107,000 units. Pickup truck and minivan sales growth lagged slightly behind the overall industry’s pace, commercial van volume jumped 16%, and SUV/crossover sales rose 15%.

• Record sales achieved by 15 auto brands

• F-Series, Civic, Escape, Grand Caravan lead categories

• Six auto brands report YOY declines

Car sales were flat, which resulted in a market share decline from 44.6% in 2014 to 42.1% in 2014. In December, even with a somewhat impressive 11% improvement, passenger cars accounted for less than 38% of all new vehicle sales.

The fastest-growing auto brands were not so afflicted. Jeep volume shot up 58% to a record-setting 70,503 units. Jeep, of course, does not market any passenger cars. Read More >

We haven’t shied away from discussing the error of Volkswagen USA’s ways here on TTAC nor the results of those ways. Yet while the brand saw its U.S. market share fall from a measly 2.6% in 2013 to 2.2% in 2014 and group-wide market share fell from 3.9% to 3.6%, year-over-year, VW Group market share in the United Kingdom grew by half a percentage point to 20.7% in 2014.

True, the Volkswagen brand itself saw its market share fall despite year-over-year volume growth of 4%. Volkswagen is the UK’s third-best-selling brand behind Ford and GM’s Vauxhall.

Read More >

Subtract the growth achieved by America’s 19 most meaningfully improved vehicles in 2014 and the U.S. auto industry was up just 1.0%, not 5.9%, last year.

The Audi A3; BMW 3-Series/4-Series; Chevrolet Cruze and Silverado; GMC Sierra; Honda Accord and CR-V; Jeep Cherokee; Kia Soul; Nissan Sentra, Rogue, and Versa; Ram P/U; Subaru Forester and Outback; and Toyota’s Camry, Corolla, RAV4, and 4Runner all produced in excess of 20,000 more sales in 2014 than in 2013, combining for 764,885 extra sales in a market which grew by approximately 927,000 units. Read More >

Compared with the prior year, the Ford Motor Company lost one full percentage point of market share in the United States in 2014. While preparing to replace their F-150, Ford/Lincoln market share fell from 15.9% to 14.9% as F-Series sales predictably stalled in an expanding market and as Ford brand car sales slid 4%.

Poised to pickup Ford’s share was Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. The company’s Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep, Maserati, and Ram brands boosted FCA’s U.S. market share from 11.6% in 2013 to 12.7% in 2014. Maserati, Jeep, and Ram were America’s fastest-growing auto brands.  Read More >

Nissan USA announced on December 16, 2014, that the next Titan, the second Titan, the first all-new Titan since 2003, will be introduced at 2015’s NAIAS in Detroit on January 12, 2015.

Hardly altered since the production truck arrived for the 2004 model year, the Titan is now somewhat embarrassing. Yet while the truck never had the potential to tackle full-size pickup trucks from Ford, General Motors, and Ram – Toyota can’t either – in the same way Nissan’s Altima can outsell their midsize sedans and Nissan’s Versa their subcompacts, initial U.S. volume was respectable. Read More >

Even in the Acura TLX’s best sales month, the brand’s MDX and RDX crossovers still accounted for 55% of Acura sales in the United States.

With the TLX now consistently generating around three out of every ten Acura sales in America, it’s safe to say that Acura’s passenger car division is, for the moment, in safer hands than it was with the TL and TSX last year. Together, they generated 25% of Acura’s total volume in calendar year 2013, down from 40% in 2012 and 50% in 2011.  Read More >

Passenger car sales in the United States are up just 1% as the overall industry has grown more than 5% through the first eleven months of 2014. America’s two best-selling premium brands, however, are enjoying more encouraging passenger car numbers in 2014. Quickly decreasing fuel prices are not, as of yet, slowing car volume at BMW in the least. Read More >