Four out of every ten new vehicles sold in May 2015 in the United States by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles were Jeeps, ten years after Jeep accounted for just 20% of Chrysler Group’s U.S. sales.
The automaker’s 4% year-over-year improvement was powered in large part by Jeep’s 13% gain. FCA volume improved by 8,000 units despite a 58% decrease in minivan volume. How’d they do it?
Through the first five months of 2015, the Toyota Camry opened up a lead of nearly 36,000 units over the Nissan Altima in the race to end the year as America’s best-selling midsize car.
Aside from popularity, the Camry and Altima – as well as nearly every intermediate car on the market – share another factor in common: their sales are declining. (Read More…)
In May 2015, for the fifth consecutive month, more than one-third of the new vehicles sold in the United States were SUVs and crossovers. Year-over-year, the share of the market earned by utility vehicles increased from slightly less than 32% to slightly more than 34%, a gain equal to 50,000 extra sales in a market which saw passenger car volume tumble by nearly 30,000 units.
Led by the Honda CR-V, which was actually down 1% in May 2015, the U.S. SUV/crossover market was strengthened by new products last month. May was the second full month for the Jeep Renegade in what turned out to be the highest-volume month in the Jeep brand’s history. Not only did Jeep sell more than 20,000 Wranglers for the first time ever, not only did Jeep break the Cherokee’s sales record, but they also sold 4,416 copies of the Renegade. (Read More…)
General Motors earned 17.9% of the U.S. auto industry’s sales volume in May 2015, a drop from 18.5% one month ago but a slight improvement compared with May 2014, when GM’s market share stood at 17.7%.
In May 2015, GM’s U.S. sales grew at a 3% clip, twice the rate of improvement posted by the overall auto industry. GM’s gains came mainly as a result of improved pickup truck volume and a strong month for Lambda crossovers. (Read More…)
Midsize pickups have increased their share of the overall pickup truck category by around four percentage points since GM launched the second-generation Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon.
Compared with a period when the twins weren’t on sale, the volume sent the direction of midsize pickups jumped 50% over the first four months of 2015. That gain of 39,000 units wasn’t simply down to the GM twins, either, as the class-leading Toyota Tacoma is growing faster than the overall pickup truck category. (Read More…)
As recently as 2009, Dodge was the sixth-best-selling auto brand in the United States.
But through the first four months of 2015, Dodge is the tenth-best-selling auto brand in America. Granted, Dodge volume has fallen 15% year-over-year, but the real reason for Dodge’s lower ranking is that the Dodge of today isn’t the Dodge of yesterday. (Read More…)
Audi USA sold 16,827 new vehicles in April 2015, an increase of 1174 units compared with Audi’s previous best-ever April in 2014, and the 52nd consecutive month in which Audi U.S. volume has broken the previous monthly record.
Year-over-year, Audi sales have increased in each of the last 66 months, a streak stretching back to November 2009.
Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures. Follow on Twitter @goodcarbadcar and on Facebook.
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.
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…)
Commercial van sales are on the rise in the United States. But of greater interest than the improvements – total sales jumped 14% to 356,814 units in 2014 and are up 26% to 87,866 year-to-date – is the constant change in the category. (Read More…)
Not surprisingly, one of only a couple automakers with an SUV-only auto brand is enjoying record sales at that SUV brand in an era of booming utility vehicle sales.
At this stage in 2013, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles/Chrysler Group was selling more cars in the United States than SUVs and crossovers. Those figures flipped one year later and became even more disparate in the first-quarter of 2015. (Read More…)
GM’s U.S. market share declined from 18.4% in February 2015 to 16.1% the following month as the automaker’s sales slid 2%, year-over-year, in a market which expanded marginally. GM earned 16.7% of the U.S. auto industry’s volume in March 2014.
Compared with February, Toyota, Ford, Hyundai-Kia, and the BMW Group all produced market share improvements worthy of mention. Honda’s share fell slightly from 8.4% to 8.2%; FCA was down from 13.1% in February to 12.8% in March.
The industry’s 1.55M new vehicle sales represented the best March since 2005.
Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures.
Two weeks ago we published a chart that showed GM’s decreasing passenger car emphasis over the last 14 months. Last Saturday, we showed GM’s annual U.S. sales volume by vehicle type. This week, we’re continuing the GM examination with a look at the brand allotment over the last decade.
Aside from the Chrysler Group, no automaker has undergone such a dramatic restructuring during the last decade. The public face of the GM restructuring, apart from the shuttering of dealerships, congressional hearings, and a revolving door of new faces in the executive’s chair, was the dismissal of a number of brands. Hummer, Saturn, Oldsmobile, and Pontiac were killed off. Saab is still kind of a thing, but not GM’s thing. (Read More…)
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…)
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.
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