Infiniti USA reported a 20% year-over-year February 2015 sales improvement, a gain of nearly 2000 sales during a period which saw Cadillac, Buick, Jaguar, and Lincoln sales decrease. Among premium brands, only Land Rover (up 23%), and Lexus (up 22%) posted greater February gains than Infiniti.

In fact, Infiniti’s February improvement was the second consecutive for Nissan’s upmarket brand – Infiniti sales rose 7% in the first month of 2015 – a meaningful statistic given the way 2014 ended. Second-half sales last year slid 10%.

Moreover, it marked the best February ever for the brand: 27% better than February 2013, 26% better than February 2012, 28% better than February 2011, 66% better than February 2010. Read More >

Clamoring for a Dodge Challenger or Charger Hellcat? You’ll have to take a number to order one, as the brand is restricting new orders until it catches up.

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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 >

What is Buick in America without the Encore, the automaker’s most disparaged product on these pages?

Buick reported 16,114 LaCrosse, Regal, Verano, and Enclave sales in February 2014, a figure which fell 22% in February 2015, when the aging products were, quite obviously, one year older.

Year-to-date volume of non-Encore Buicks tumbled 20% through the first two months of 2015, a loss of 5441 sales across four nameplates. Read More >

Per inside sources, Hyundai is planning to increase SUV production in the United States in an effort to capture more consumers amid low fuel prices.

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It seems like yesterday
But it was long ago
RS America in the dealership’s lights
Covered with dust and it had nowhere to go
And it sat there for a year
Till they sold it at a loss
Slow like a Boxster headlights just like a frog
And all the service had been skipped and no one gave a toss

And I remember how cheap they used to be
And I thought that it never would end
I remember how they bought and sold for pennies
Wish I’d had a crystal ball and bought one then

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Hoping to drive home in a front-driven BMW 2 Series? You’ll have to settle for the RWD coupe, as the automaker has no plans to sell the former in the U.S.

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2015 will be the Nissan Xterra’s final model year. The final nails in the coffin were hammered in by an increasingly popular crossover market, total domination on the off-road category by the Jeep Wranglers, and Nissan’s inability to affordably recreate the Xterra with modern regulatory concerns in mind.

This doesn’t mean Nissan isn’t competing in the SUV market any more, but most of the automaker’s remaining SUVs are true crossovers. Nissan USA sold 376,388 Rogues, Pathfinders, Muranos, Jukes, and Titan-based Armadas in 2014.

Xterra volume, meanwhile, tumbled 77% over the course of a decade, falling by 55,942 units to 16,505 U.S. sales in 2005. Read More >

Often criticized for its poor performance in North American markets, the Dodge Dart has performed significantly better over the last five months, a period in which its midsize sibling, Dodge’s Avenger, gradually disappeared.

After generating nearly 50,000 U.S. sales in the first three-quarters of 2014, the discontinued Avenger dried up at the end of the year, generating only 2342 sales in the fourth-quarter and 461 in the first two months of 2015. The clear-out of deeply discounted, V6-engined, midsize cars from the Dodge portfolio opened up an opportunity for the Dart. Read More >

Tesla may be denying delays in the construction of its Gigafactory, but the automaker’s not holding back on firing 200 employees in China due to poor sales.

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It’s official: Subaru is now routinely the seller of more than 40,000 new vehicles per month in the United States. That’s an impressive achievement considering that in 2013, the company averaged 35,390 monthly sales in what was the automaker’s best year ever. Between 2002 and 2012, Subaru USA averaged fewer than 19,000 monthly sales.

In each of the last twelve months, Subaru sales have shot past the 40,000-unit mark. Subaru USA had crested the 40K barrier twice in the previous seven months. But now all the brand’s best-ever performances have occurred in the recent past. Read More >

General Motors has reported 28,218 sales of their new midsize trucks since the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon arrived late in September 2014. Sales of both trucks have increased every month since arriving at dealers. Colorado volume in February was 177% stronger than it was in November; Canyon sales shot up 194% during the same period.

Neither GM pickup is the top-selling non-full-size truck in America, however, nor can GM yet claim the title when their sales are combined. Since October, sales of the top-selling Toyota Tacoma have increased 10% to 64,093 units.

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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.

In 2013, Opel left Australia amid poor sales in the land down under. This year, it’s Smart that is bowing out of the market.

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The Volkswagen brand had arrested its sales decline in the United States. After 18 consecutive months of decreased year-over-year volume, Volkswagen sales increased in October, November, December, and January.

• Everything but the Golf drops

• Golf R returns

• Total Golf sales up 138%

Granted, those increased sales appeared only in comparison to the prior year period, when Volkswagen was in the middle of an 18-month downward streak. Compared with the equivalent period two years earlier, VW of America sales tumbled 12% in October 2014, 14% in November, 23% in December, and 19% in January 2015. Moreover, the reported yeear-over-year improvements were mostly slight: 8% in October, 3% in November, 0.1% in December, and 0.04% in January.

Perhaps Volkswagen was simply regressing toward the mean, rather than stopping a oncoming train in its tracks. February volume slid 5% in a market which grew 5%.

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