China’s car market will take it easy and grow only 3 to 5 percent this year after surging 32 percent to more than 18 million last year. This is the prediction of China’s State Information Center, as reported by Bloomberg. Read More >

August usually is not a strong car selling month. Especially not in Germany, where everybody is on vacation. Nevertheless, BMW sold “significantly more than 100,000 units” in August, thereby breaking all its records for the summer month. “Business is better than we thought,” said BMW CFO Franz Eichiner to Germany’s FAZ. Read More >

Well, you’ve seen a complete chart of sales by manufacturer and brand… now it’s time for some nameplate results. Here are your top-25 best-selling nameplates for August 2011. And yes, the Honda Civic barely made the list…

With GM, “Fiat Group” and Ford improving their sales volume by 16%, 23% and 9% respectively, Detroit is dominating the headlines in early August sales analysis. But Hyundai Group’s 29% is the big percentage winner, and Nissan had a good volume month as well, up 14%. But the “big two” Japanese are continuing to slide, with Honda off 6% and Toyota down 8%. Hit the jump for our developing table…

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After a tepid July, analysts predict a likewise unenthused August when it comes to new car sales in the U.S.  The consensus of Bloomberg’s panel of 14 analysts is a seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) of 12.1 million. Read More >

Sales of regular automobiles in Japan were down 25.5 percent in August, compared to the same month in the previous year, data provided by the Japan Automobile Dealers Association shows. This sounds worse than it is: In August 2010, sales had jumped 46.7 percent, result of  a last gasp of government subsidies which were coming to an end. Read More >

GM China always had a comfortable lead over Volkswagen in China – at least on paper. More than half of GM China’s volume comes from small delivery vans, made by a three-way joint venture with SAIC and Wuling, in which GM held 34 percent. This share had been recently raised to 44 percent. The joint venture agreement allows GM to claim 100 percent of the small cars as theirs. “Whatever turns them on” (or Chinese word to that effect) say the other JV partners who happily count the cars again in their annual reports. There is one big problem with that. The “breadvan segment” (so called because the cars looks like loafs on wheels) has been shrinking and is ruining GM’s otherwise good Chinese numbers.  Now, GM can’t take it anymore, and is using a familiar tactic: “GM is sacrificing profit margins to maintain market share in China, cutting prices of low-cost minivans by as much as 15 percent to offset slowing sales in the world’s largest vehicle market,” Bloomberg reports.
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Michelle Krebs and Lacey Plache of Edmunds.com, decorated heroes of the TTAC “rate the analysts” contest (to be repeated) are raining on the parade of good sales forceasts, definitely for August, possibly for the year. Edmunds thinks that August sales will be flat. Customers are hearing mixed signals, and being confused, they do nothing. Says Lacey Plache:

“Stronger buying conditions are telling consumers to go ahead and make their car purchases, but a weak economic landscape is telling them to wait until later this year, or even longer. This is the battle that will determine exactly how much the auto industry will grow this year.” Read More >

Someone call Homeland Security: Large segments of Americans (if we still can call them that) are willing  to spend hard-earned dollars on (are you ready for that?) CHINESE cars. Market research company GfK Automotive’s did its annual Barometer of Automotive Awareness and Imagery, and found that a whopping 38 percent of the respondents would consider buying a Chinese car. Indian cars? A little less, but 30 percent ain’t nothing. That’s amongst all respondents. Once you get to Gen Y consumers, you’ll see wholesale desertion to the enemy.

Says the study:

“The openness to purchasing a Chinese and Indian vehicle is highest among Gen Y consumers, with 52 percent saying they are open to a vehicle from a Chinese automaker and 41 percent saying they are open to a vehicle from an Indian automaker.”

Imagine that. The cars aren’t even on U.S. shores, and especially basement dwellers are ready to buy them – even worse, with dad’s money. Read More >

Some time ago, I made the unpleasant discovery that Oprah Winfrey publishes a magazine devoted entirely to herself. It’s called “O!” and every month there is a photo of Oprah herself on the cover. It’s almost impossible to imagine the kind of people who would buy such a magazine, but the same could be said about a variety of products from Kenneth Cole’s Indonesian garbage shoes to “Four Loko” alcopops.

The Chevrolet Volt is TTAC’s Oprah. Not only is it overweight and despised by most right-thinking people (in a few senses of the phrase), it appears on our front page more than any other car. We’ve reviewed it at least three times, discussed it endlessly, and even attended an owner’s gathering.

We’ve recently heard that GM wants to be like Apple. Here’s the problem: GM already is like Apple. Not the current Apple, mind you, but the divided, contentious, collapsing (Cr)Apple of the early Eighties. That company had a “Volt” of its own. It was called “Lisa”, and I was there on the day it was unveiled.

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Volkswagen may have garnered a bad rap for being in the shop too much. Their sales performance however continues without a single breakdown. According to the July data (global, consolidated, all companies), the Volkswagen Group had a 16.3 percent unit sale rise in July (compared to July 2010) . From January to July, 4.75 million vehicles were sold worldwide, a 14.4 percent increase. Read More >

At the times of the Beijing Olympics in 2008, Toyota proudly stood on the podium of the Chinese sales winners, along with Volkswagen and GM. Ever since, Toyota received the wrong fortune cookies in China: Its market share deteriorated steadily, down to half of its 2008 high. Toyota now is on an all-out offensive to re-gain lost ground, with promising success. Read More >

Nissan’s “we have cars” ad may not meet with the approval of TTAC’s commenters, but it appears to be having some kind of effect. According to mid-month analysis by the A+ rated experts at Edmunds Autoobserver, Nissan’s looking at the strongest retail sales growth in the industry this month, building on last month’s already-strong performance.
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With Honda and Toyota struggling to catch up after months of tsunami-related supply interruptions, Nissan’s been passing its major Japanese competitors in sales volume, and they apparently want to keep it that way. As Bertel has reported, Nissan was able to walk away from the tsunami’s devastation practically unharmed, and it’s leveraging its strong supply of vehicles to make hay while the sun shines (or while its competitors are struggling to catch up). This ad, which is a simple reminder to consumers, is only slightly tinged with competitive feist in a scene depicting a frustrated Honda customer. Overall though, there’s not much messaging needed: Nissan has cars, other Japanese competitors don’t. And right now, that could be one of the most effective marketing messages out there. After all, as Autoobserver points out, folks trading in Japanese cars still overwhelmingly buy another Japanese car… so simply having Japanese cars on dealer lots is a huge advantage at the moment.

Sales of all car-based crossovers continue to climb, far outstripping demand for body-on-frame utes as well as pickup trucks. But strangely enough, a lot of the growth and volume among crossovers is in the compact-CUV segment, where the top-selling model last month beat July’s mid/full-CUV winner by some 10,000 units. This suggests that The Great American Downsizing, as we’ve called it, isn’t as simple as former SUV owners replacing their BOF beast with one of these comparable mid/full-CUVs. Still, this is an important segment because although the stakes aren’t wildly high, the competition is fierce. GM won by a whisker last month, but Ford’s got a strong one-two punch as well with its Explorer/Edge combo. Meanwhile, Honda’s Crosstour and Ford’s Flex have bombed all the way off our monthly volume chart. Hit the jump to find out their Year-To-Date numbers, and to find out who the somewhat surprising YTD volume winner is.

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