U.S. sales of the Buick Encore have increased, on a year-over-year basis, in each of the last 16 months. That streak includes these last five months, a period in which a more affordable twin of the Encore, the Chevrolet Trax, has also been generating meaningful U.S. sales activity.

Encore volume grew 31% in the five months preceding the Trax’s U.S. launch. Since the little Chevy’s arrival, not only has the Encore avoided a decline, the rate of its volume expansion has hardly slowed: Encore sales jumped 28% between the final month of 2014 and April 2015.

In fact, as General Motors attracted 7,477 sales with the less costly Trax in March and April, Buick reported the best month ever for the Encore in March and the second-best ever Encore performance in April, the latter being a slightly slower month for the overall auto industry. (Read More…)

Full-size pickup truck sales improved by a modest 3.1% as the U.S. auto industry climbed 4.6% in April 2015.

As a whole, the pickup truck category increased its sales at a faster clip than the overall industry, rising 7.8% thanks to 46% gains from small/midsize pickups, vehicles which accounted for 15% of all pickup truck sales in April 2015, up from 11% at this time a year ago. (Read More…)

The U.S. auto industry was projected to make 6% gains in April 2015, an increase that would have produced at least 80,000 more April sales this year than in April 2014.

Instead, April 2015 auto sales grew by less than 5%, and the industry’s volume improved by around 64,000 units. Auto sales are healthy, but why weren’t they quite as healthy last month as anticipated?

There are hundreds of factors to consider, from Bob realizing that new patio furniture was more important than a new Ram EcoDiesel, to the decreased demand for certain aging models. But if one vehicle category needed to accept blame, it would be passenger cars.  (Read More…)

Compared with the prior month, General Motors’ U.S. market share increased by more than two percentage points to 18.5% in April 2015. Toyota’s trio of brands lost slightly more than half a percentage point. American Honda jumped from 8.2% to 8.9%.

Nissan and Infiniti dropped by nearly two percentage points as the automaker suffered its normal, anticipated, severe drop-off in April volume. The auto industry’s size decreased 6% between March and April; Nissan USA’s sales fell 24% during the same period.

(Read More…)

A predicted 6% increase in April 2015 auto sales ended up as a 5% year-over-year boost, equal to nearly 65,000 more sales last month than in the same period one year ago.

The biggest gains among volume brands were produced by Jeep (with its best-ever month and a 20% increase to 71,759 April sales), GMC (another no-car brand), and Subaru.

Honda, Volkswagen, and Kia all posted slight losses, however, and the gains produced by big brands like Toyota, Hyundai, and Chevrolet weren’t all that significant. Ford, the best-selling auto brand in America, was up 5%. General Motors’, the top-selling manufacturer, increased 6% despite the third Buick decline in four months.  (Read More…)

The Cadillac ATS’s launch in the fourth-quarter of 2012 was the most important for the Cadillac brand since whatever Cadillac’s previous most important launch was.

But very early on, Cadillac simply wasn’t selling as many as they wanted to. Sales weren’t terribly low – Cadillac averaged 3,200 U.S. ATS sales in calendar year 2013, but incentivization kicked in early. After peaking at 3,887 units in December 2013, sales have decreased on a year-over-year basis in 14 of 15 months, including in each of the last eleven months.

Only a two-unit, 0.07% uptick in April 2014 interrupted what would otherwise be a streak of decreases stretching back to the beginning of last year.

So here’s the question: with April sales results set to be released tomorrow, will the Cadillac ATS’s sales stats display a full year of year-over-year monthly declines? (Read More…)

For the eleventh time in twelve months and the third consecutive month, U.S. sales of the Mazda 6 increased in March 2015. Only a slight 42-unit decline in December broke what would now be a full year-long streak of year-over-year improvement for the 6.

With help from a refreshed-for-2016 model already making up the bulk of Mazda’s 6 inventory, Mazda USA is now on track to sell more than 65,000 6 sedans in calendar year 2015, a rate of sales that would return the midsize Mazda to a nine-year high.

Last month was a particularly productive period according to Mazda’s end-of-quarter sales report: “The refreshed 2016 Mazda6 recorded its best month of sales since March of 2012 with 7,570 vehicles sold, an increase of 32.1 percent over March of 2014.” (Read More…)

It’s been five months since BMW’s sales boss, Ian Robertson, made news by questioning the long-term viability of the sports car. “The sports car market is roughly half of what it used to be. Post-2008, it just collapsed. I’m not so sure it’ll ever fully recover,” Robertson said.

BMW, of course, is the maker of the Z4, a car which generates only one-tenth the volume now that it did when launched as a successor to the Z3. In other words, it’s not much wonder BMW wonders whether outright sports cars have a future.  (Read More…)

Land Rover USA reported more than 1000 Range Rover sales in each of the last six months and in eight of the last nine months. Year-over-year volume has now increased in four consecutive months as well as in seven of the last eight months.

But it was the month of March in particular that drew special attention to U.S. sales performance of one of the world’s best known high-end SUVs.

Land Rover reported 1996 Range Rover sales in America in March 2015, a 151%, 1202-unit year-over-year increase. (Read More…)

With 29% and 30% of their U.S. sales coming from pickup trucks, respectively, General Motors and Ford Motor Company fall from the top two positions to the second and third when auto manufacturer sales are compared without pickups.

Toyota, therefore, becomes the top dog with 507,000 non-pickup sales through the first-quarter of 2015, 21,000 more cars, vans, SUVs, and crossovers than General Motors.

Excluding Frontiers, Titans, and Ridgelines doesn’t change the fact that Nissan and Infiniti are still outselling Honda and Acura. Fiat Chrysler Automobiles nearly pulls level with Ford MoCo when the Ram and dominant F-Series, America’s best-selling vehicle line, are left out of the equation. (Read More…)

GM’s share of America’s subcompact segment fell below 10% in the first-quarter of 2015 as Chevrolet Sonic volume tumbled 53%, year-over-year.

As a whole, the subcompact category is in decline in early 2015, but a large part of the category’s 9% drop can be attributed to the Sonic. Sales of the Sonic decreased by nearly 13,000 units over the last three months. (Read More…)

It’s going to be a while before you can buy a next-gen Honda Civic Type R in North America.

We’ve seen the relatively thinly veiled version of the next Civic. Patent images were published on TTAC last week. But, according to AutoGuide’s Colum Wood, American Honda’s Executive Vice President, John Mendel, told reporters after the New York Auto Show that the Civic Type R won’t appear here until at least 2017. “It could be an ‘18 by the time it gets here,” Mendel said.

Clearly, the pricing scheme for the Civic Type R is many months away from being revealed, let alone determined. Yet the most interesting revelation from Mendel wasn’t about the wait, but rather the number of Type Rs Honda believes the company can sell in the United States each month after the car arrives.

“I’d hope we could sell a couple thousand a month,” Mendel said, a number which – in current terms – would have accounted for approximately 8% of the Civics sold in America in the first-quarter of 2015. (Read More…)

The Kia Sedona is the fastest-growing auto nameplate in the United States so far this year, nearly quintupling its first-quarter volume to 7670 units in 2015’s first three months.

We chose not to factor in the GMC Canyon, Chevrolet Colorado, and Audi A3, all of which actually recorded even year-over-year percentage improvements, not because they’re not selling at a far more prodigious pace than they did a year ago, but because they weren’t available in new or old form at this stage last year. Nor were the Kia K900 and Ram ProMaster, vehicles which would also have cracked the top ten. (Read More…)

The Ford Mustang outsold the whole Lincoln brand by a 1.5-to-1 count in March. U.S. Mustang volume has, not surprisingly, risen sharply since the age of the sixth-generation model began.

March’s tally, however, was particularly notable, not just because of the way in which Mustang volume made Lincoln’s abysmal total appear even worse (Lincoln sales slid 3%, year-over-year, to just 8695 units) but because the Mustang outsold the Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger, combined.

That won’t become a long-term trend. General Motors is already gradually leaking details of its next Camaro. The Challenger, meanwhile, is selling better than ever. Sales have only increased on an annual basis since Dodge brought the nameplate back in 2008. (Read More…)

The first three months of 2015 marked the lowest-volume quarter of U.S. Chevrolet Volt sales since the summer of 2011, when Volt production was just ramping up.

Volt volume in January of this year, more specifically, fell to the lowest level since August 2011. With only 542 sales in the first month of 2015, Volt sales were down 41%.

February sales then tumbled 43%. Most recently, March 2015 volume slid below 1000 units for the third time in three months, tumbling 57% to just 639 units, just the fourth time in 38 months that GM has sold fewer than 1000 Volts in the span of a month.  (Read More…)