Nissan seems to have a golden hand for mini-utes. First, they had to put in a third shift in Europe for their unpronounceable Qashqai crossover. Now, news reaches us from Japan (via The Nikkei [sub]) that orders for their Juke compact SUV that went on sale in japan a few days ago, the monthly sales target of 1,300 units by over 300 percent in the first week alone. Read More >

Batten hatches! Europe is on an emergency dive. According to data just released by the ACEA, sales in May dropped by 9.3 percent compared to May 2009. Our Ford canary in the EU coal mine was right again: May numbers were worse than April numbers. In April, the EU market had been down 7.4 percent. But that’s not the worst part. Read More >

We’re still taking email requests for Chart Of The Day [editors@ttac.com], but today’s chart isn’t one of them. This little data nuglet, of May volume by manufacturer, was requested by popular acclaim in the comments section of the last COTD… and was bound to be posted eventually anyway. After all, brand volumes are all well and good for armchair junior execs to wrangle over… but the armchair CEO demands volume by manufacturer. Let the harumphing begin!

Undeterred by crashing European sales numbers, Nissan is forging ahead and adds – are we reading this right? –  “a third shift at its British production line for sport utility vehicles, raising output 30 percent to nearly 24,000 units a month,” says The Nikkei [sub]. Read More >

ACEA hasn’t released European numbers for May yet (they are expected within the next days,) but in case you have a financial, business, or other interest, be advised that the results will be grim. How do we know that? By reading a press release by Ford Europe. Ford has consistently jumped the gun on releasing European numbers, and has turned into TTAC’s canary in the EU coal mine. What TTAC’s patent-pending GM indicator is for China, Ford becomes for Europe. Executive summary: May was another blood bath for the EU. Ford underperformed the EU market nearly 2:1. Read More >

As reported earlier, sales in Brazil in May were a mixed bag. Compared to April, sales slid 9.6 percent (from 278,000 vehicles in April, to 251,000 last month). However, on a year to year basis, sales managed an improvement of 1.7 percent over May 2009.  The first five months of 2010 are still going at a record-breaking, best-ever pace (according to Brazilian enthusiast site bestcars.com.br). With the end of incentives clearly causing strain, the question is: How long? Read More >

Spoiled market watchers were disappointed by China’s less than red-hot May numbers: Passenger vehicles grew just 23.2 percent, the whole market grew 26 percent. Now here’s a number worth waiting for (or to induce a heart attack, if you have green leanings:) Read More >

Thomas Olesen wrote in to request a May 2010 brand volume chart. His wish just came true. Your wildest US-market auto sales questions can be answered too, if you just send your request to editors@ttac.com.

Good night, sweet luxo-barge. After nearly 10 years in production, the 430’s sales have fallen from about 14k in its first several years on sale to 720 units last year and about 2k units the year before that. Which, for a rather ungainly and quite expensive boulevardier, is not half bad at all. It will never be a car that enjoys enthusiast or collector cachet, but cougars and their plastic surgeons alike appreciate its smooth power, anonymously ostentatious looks, and old-school personal luxury coupe style. In short, it’s been the closest thing to an old-school Buick Riviera on the US market in decades. And as of July it will be gone forever.

I know you are tired of China sales numbers. Just for the record: The final, official  tally of all passenger  vehicles sold in China in May stands at 1.04m units, up 26 percent from last year, says the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) via Gasgoo. The CAAM has the last word. Total vehicle sales hit 1.44m units, up 28.8 percent, says the Straits Times. With these numbers, we declare the TTAC patent-pending Growth-o-Meter as broken. Wuling’s lousy may numbers did it in. As a make-good, another round of the very best of Chinese traffic accidents. In color!

TTAC Commenter Charles T writes in:

Any chance you could do $30-$40k entry-level luxury, ie BMW 3-series and everyone else gunning for a piece of that pie? For completeness sake, include cars that normally aren’t positioned against the 3-series despite being a similar price (Lexus ES and Lincoln MKZ, for example) just as a sense of their relative market sizes; I’d be curious to see how the sporty vs unsporty dichotomy plays out in the real world.

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Approximately 1 million passenger cars (including MPVs, SUVs, and Minivans) changed hands in China in May, up 23.2 percent from a year earlier, the lowest rate during the past 13 months. That according to the China Passenger Car Association, as reported in China Daily. This is not yet the total vehicle count, which should be reported by the CAAM a few days later. The passenger car number usually is within a few points of the CAAM number. Is that good or bad? Read More >

Remember that the Google seismometer registered tectonic movements at Nissan’s future plug-in, the Leaf? In Japan, it rocks. Nissan planned to make 6,000 of them in the Fiscal year ending on March 31, 2011. On April 1, they started taking pre-orders. Yesterday, Nissan had received advance orders for 6,000 units, says The Nikkei [sub]. Sales target met, long before the car will go on sale in December. Read More >

We like to think of TTAC as something of the thinking (wo)man’s car blog: sure, we’ll try to drive the hot cars, but we’ll be just as interested in their history, sales and cultural context as their 0-60 time. One of the ways we like to help contextualize these, the most emotional artifacts of our material culture, is by breaking them down into their unforgiving sales numbers. In addition to our now-normal monthly binge of sales graphs, we will try to bring you one graph per day, illustrating a previously unexplored view of the market for automobiles. Today, we start with Luxury Crossovers, a segment invented by its current chapion, the Lexus RX.

What will tomorrow’s Chart Of The Day be? Email us at editors@ttac.com, and let us know what models, segments or brands you want to see compared.

Once again Detroit finds itself atop Edmunds’ True Cost of Incentive ranking of the top seven automakers [via earthtimes], as the domestic OEMs spent about $1.7b (or, about 60 percent) of the $2.8b paid out by the entire industry on incentives last month. Trucks were the most heavily discounted segment, with average incentives running around $4,650, or nearly 13 percent of the average segment sticker price. Saab spent the most by brand, slapping an average of $6,813 on its vehicles, with Lincoln coming in second at $4,987 per vehicle sold. Saab’s incentives equaled 17.1 percent of its average vehicle price, while Chrysler gave away about 12.2 percent of its average vehicle price last month.

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