The Honda Accord has Camryschadenfreude written all over it. With a 41% increase, and 22k units sold, the Accord is off to a likely win in the passenger car sweepstakes of 2010. The Civic didn’t ride the updraft nearly as well, with a modest 5% lift. The Insight’s 2k units continue to tail the Prius’ 8k units by a 1 to 4 ratio, somewhat better than a few months back.
The Honda brand was up 12%, and Acura by 17%. But all of Acura’s cars were down; its growth was fueled by the two CUVs: MDX: +65%; RDX: +20%. Honda CUVs were all down a bit, and the Odyssey up a tad. And three FCX Clarities were leased. Full details: Read More >
Chrysler sold exactly 399 more vehicles in February than it did in February of 2009, which would be a respectable performance if the comparison weren’t with one of Chrysler’s worst months on record. GM may be tentatively nosing its way out of the bottom of a sales trough, but Chrysler is treading water at unsustainable levels (CEO Sergio Marchionne has said he “needs” Chrysler to sell 1.1m units in the US this year). Considering that a huge amount of Chrysler’s sales release [PDF format here] is spent detailing the company’s many consumer incentives, Marchionne’s goal of turning ChryCo into a 1.1m-unit, incentive-less juggernaut seems less realistic with every passing month.
Is it good news or bad news? After January’s 16% drop, February’s 9% slide could be evidence that the worst is behind Toyota’s fall from sales grace. It certainly seems that the models most connected to the recalls and bad news are being hit the hardest, with the flagship Camry down a nasty 20%. Just to show how the tide has changed, Camry outsold the Fusion by exactly 93 units. The Avalon was off 65%, suggesting that the gray panthers are avoiding its UA issues; let’s just hope they’re not buying Town Cars instead. The newly revised Lexus ES 350, also a UA posterchild, was off a fairly mild 9%.
Overall, Toyota brand vehicles were hit harder (-11%) than Lexus, which was up 5% in the month. The Lexus GX (+185%) helped keep the division in the positive side of the ledger. Prius managed a tidy 10% gain despite the bad publicity. Corolla was down a modest 6%. The new 4Runner is off to a good start with almost 3k units and up 55%. Full details after the jump: Read More >
Here’s a question for you automotive sales historians: when was the last time (month) Ford outsold GM? Four hundred and seventy one cars was the difference, but the bragging rights would have been worth it if Ford had given them away. Here are the highlights: Sales were up a Toyota tidy 22% from January. Camry-fighter Fusion experienced unintended sales acceleration, rocketing ahead at an unrestrained 116 mph percent.Ford brand vehicles were up 46%; Mercury +24%; Lincoln +19%. Company wide, passenger cars were up 54%, utilities +39%, trucks +36%. Retail sales were up 28%, as fleet sales came back to “normal” after a near stand-still a year ago. Ford estimates its February market share at 17%, up a hefty 3 points from a year ago. Detailed charts follow: Read More >
With rumors of another GM executive shakeup flying thick and fast, we expected a downright miserable sales performance from The General in February. By the year-over-year numbers [full release here, sales numbers in PDF format here], there’s no such flow of red tape, as GM’s four “core brands” gained 32 percent and total sales (including Hummer, Pontiac, Saab and Saturn) were up 11.5 percent. But that’s in comparison to February of 2009, when GM’s sales were down 53 percent from the year earlier. In short, GM appears to have hit bottom in terms of volume, but it still has yet to recover to anything close to 2008 volume. Read More >
German car buyers boycotted the showrooms in February. Sales crashed to the tune of 29.8 percent. This according to the German car importers association VDIK via Das Autohaus [sub]. The number is not the official number (yet) but the VDIK is usually reliable. Only 195,000 new cars changed hands, compared to 278,000 in February last year.
Germany is in the vise grips of a huge hangover from the cash-for-clunkers Abwrackprämien-orgy of 2009. In February 2009, the program was launched, and sales started to take off by 21 percent. Sales reached a 40 percent apogee in June. Compared to these numbers, the coming months will look absolutely awful. Small cars and subminiature vehicles, the big gainers of the Abwrackprämie, crashed the most. Read More >
„Itai!“ Or rather, „tong!“ Ouch, that hurts: Toyota boss Akio Toyoda bowed deeply to 300 reporters assembled in Beijing, and to 1.3b Chinese who could watch the drama live on national TV. Four times in one hour, Toyota’s chief “apologized to customers in China for the company’s quality problems and emphasized the significance of the nation’s fast-growing market to his company,” as Shanghai Daily has it. There must be nothing more painful for an upstanding Japanese captain of industry than to bow deeply in front of the Chinese. But as they say in China: „bú tòng bù qiáng.” No pain, no gain. Even more astonishing: Read More >
Shortly after emerging from bankruptcy last July, when GM’s sales were still showing few signs of recovery, then-Sales and Marketing boss Mark LaNeve had his marketing responsibilities stripped about a week before monthly sales came out. In a matter of months, LaNeve was out the door. Sales and marketing were rolled together again when Susan Docherty took over for LaNeve, but over the weekend it was once again stripped away, in one of the first signs that Docherty’s star is no longer rising at GM. And lets go ahead and start assuming that February sales must be looking fairly grim, because the only real explanation given to Automotive News [sub] is that
The shakeup shows that Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre is impatient to boost sales and for consumers to appreciate what he believes is the high quality of GM vehicles. When he became chief executive in December, Whitacre said his sales and marketing team would need to show results quickly.
The perception gap claims another victim! But Docherty’s downgrade is Mark Reuss’s gain. The former Holden boss, now GM’s President of North American operations, will assume the sales responsibilities, leaving Docherty time to focus on the marketing side and polish up her resumé.
Japanese sales of new cars and trucks continue their solid comeback in February. Japan has filed away carmageddon. Japan is utterly unimpressed by the Toyota troubles. Japan has not been spared Toyota recalls. The hearings and public apologies have received wide coverage in Japan. And what is the Japanese reaction? A plus 47.9 percent vote of confidence. With the currently very tight Japanese wallets. There is a long waiting list for the Prius, Toyota’s best selling car. [Editor’s note: Japan is currently in the throes of its own Cash-for-Clunker prgram]
Also interesting: Sales of minivehicles, formerly feted as the future, are barely holding their own, whereas sales of “real” cars continue their double digit climb. Let’s look at the numbers: Read More >
Toyota may record “a double-digit drop in the automaker’s U.S. sales for February,” says The Nikkei [sub] today. The Nikkei bolsters the assessment with interviews at dealerships in the U.S.A., but knowing the Nikkei, a sales droid in northern California is not their only source.
The Nikkei notes that “Toyota was the only major automaker to suffer a double-digit sales decline in the U.S. last month. Its sales were down 15.8 percent from a year earlier, compared with the 24.4 percent and 14.6 percent growth enjoyed by Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Co..”
A continuation of this trend would be extremely dangerous for Toyota. We are comparing with the absolutely worst times of carmageddon, and if you are double digits below carmageddon, you roast in hell. Read More >
Surprisingly good news out of Japan: Seemingly unimpeded by the Toyota-bashing, production of cars, trucks and buses in Japan increased 30.7 percent on year in January. Output is up for the third consecutive month, the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association said today via The Nikkei [sub]. Vehicle output rose to 753,773 vehicles in January from 576,539 vehicles in the same month a year earlier.
Even better fared Japan’s exports of cars, trucks and buses: Exports shot up 45.6 percent from a year earlier in January, the first rise in 16 months, says The Nikkei [sub] in a separate report. “Shipments to key markets such as Asia, Europe and” – gasp – “North America increased in line with recovering auto demand.” To this embedded observer, it seems as if the jobs created by this brouhaha are in Japan.
Let’s see what the next month brings, especially in the U.S. Awfully little, predicts Reuters. Read More >
Long time depressed car production in Japan continues to show robust signs of life, mostly caused by equally surprising domestic demand and a pick-up in exports. And there is another explanation … Read More >
Fiat is acknowledging a “a collapse in orders” as Italian scrappage rebates expire, and as a result, all six Italian Fiat plants will close for two weeks [via the BBC]. The move is being justified as a break from past overproduction, with Fiat spokesfolks claiming “we’re only building to demand.” Though that might help CEO Sergio Marchionne justify his $6.5m paycheck, it couldn’t come at a worse time. Fiat is putting 30,000 employees out of work for the next 14 days, just as it faces widespread protests over the closure of its Sicilian Termini Imerese plant. With the Italian government (and even the Pope) condemning Marchionne’s decision to cut the perpetually money-losing plant, this unplanned vacation will give workers plenty of time to agitate and organize further resistance. Not that Marchionne could have avoided it. Italy’s consumer subsidies for new cars were keeping demand artificially high, and the Italian government was hoping it could offer their renewal in exchange for a Fiat commitment to the Imerese plant. But as the Wall Street Journal [sub] opines, Europe’s scrappage-swollen market has to come down to earth at some point. Just as Fiat has to rid itself of some of its terminally underperforming Italian capacity, at some point. And, as usual, there’s no time like the present.
After decades of “up-positioning” and premium-branding, the sudden success of cheapskate models such as the Dacia Logan has not gone unnoticed at Europe’s largest automaker Volkswagen. Czech media is abuzz with reports of a new entry model, blatantly codenamed “A Entry,” which may be part of the Skoda line-up.
Reuters cites Czech media reports that the new model could be priced around $13,650, putting it somewhere between Skoda’s smaller (Polo-based) Fabia and the larger Octavia, which sits on a PQ35 (think Golf, Jetta) platform. Priced and positioned like that, it won’t be a Logan-killer. The Dacia goes for under $10,000 MSRP.
In the meantime, rumors that VW aims a lot lower won’t die in Wolfsburg. Read More >
When the Toyota recall debacle kicked off, there were two types of reactions from their competitors. There were the ones who went after Toyota customers like a Catholic priest after a choir boy. And then, there was the “we are taking the high road” brood. Franco-Japanese Nissan were a part of the “we are way above this” bunch. They confirmed that they wouldn’t be introducing programs to woo Toyota customers. Who would want a Nipponese cannibalisation in the far abroad?
Chrysler sold exactly 399 more vehicles in February than it did in February of 2009, which would be a respectable performance if the comparison weren’t with 
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