Ford outsells The General for the second month since 1998, and suddenly an age-old rivalry seems to be spluttering back to life. And, based on our latest chart set from Morgan & Company, Ford’s got some middle-term momentum on its side… although the near-term picture is still delightfully uncertain. As we roll out our monthly sales analysis, we’ll keep a special eye on the key segment battles between these two cross-town combatants. After all, one of the all-time great American rivalries may just be as up for grabs as it’s been in decades.

[Note: given the divisive subject matter, the management asks that commenters in this thread take special care to temper their allegiances with mutual respect and an open mind.]

Competition may be tightening for midsized sedan sales, but the battle is already well underway in the Mid/Large CUV category. Seven vehicles find themselves within 5k sales of each other at the top of this chart, making for something of a knife fight for large CUV buyers. Even much-hyped new entries from the Explorer and Grand Cherokee franchises (please note: February 2010 volume for both represents sales of the previous model) haven’t broken the stalemate in the war to become King of the Krossovers… in fact, Explorer isn’t even in the bunch battling for first place. Add  up the volume, and the Lambda platform is the winner, but this segment still lacks clarity. Let the competition continue!

For all the buzz surrounding the Compact segment, the real battle at the moment seems to be in the Midsized (D-Segment) class. As in the C-Segment, Toyota is maintaining its leadership by a healthy margin, but right below it there’s a knife fight between Fusion, Accord, Altima and Malibu (look for this fight to include Sonata if Hyundai brings more capacity online). The fact that Accord no longer has a lock on second place has opened a huge opportunity, as the contenders clamor to become the Camry’s main rival. But this battle for second place has also bifurcated the segment into contenders (15k units and up) and everyone else. And speaking of “everyone else,” Mazda6 dropped off our chart this month with only 2,838 deliveries, hanging out with such underachievers as the Passat/CC (1,750 units) and Saab 9-3 (494).

Unlike a number of segments, the Compact Crossover space has a fairly well-established order. And with no new products in this segment on tap for this year, it’s hard to see this ranking changing too much in the next 12 months or so. Still, the C-CUV is becoming an increasingly important segment, and even if automakers aren’t stealing much share from each other here, all the major models are improving their sales. Could this be the segment where everyone wins?

Say what you want about Toyota’s recent struggles, it still knows how to sell the bejeezus out of its C-segment Corolla/Matrix juggernaut. Toyota’s compact twosome outsold its next closest competitor by more volume than the Kia Forte sold on its own. Chevy’s Cruze is also sneaking up on Civic (please note: Feb 2010 volume for Cruze is actually Cobalt), and VW’s new Jetta is streaking up the charts, landing Volkswagen’s C-segment offerings into fourth place (Golf made up only 2,337 of that volume). Elantra and Sentra are neck-and-neck, although look for Nissan’s aging compact to be leapfrogged by both Hyundai and Ford when fully ramped-up volumes of the new Elantra and Focus hit dealers.

On most weekends, TTAC publishes the fun, frivolous kinds of stories that don’t make it into our regular weekly coverage, exposing our readers to everything from the hilarity of the LeMons series, to obscure automotive histories to pictorials of such undercovered vehicles as vintage Snow Cats. This weekend, however, TTAC is feeding you your vegetables: sales graphs of the major automotive segments from February. We start our coverage with the subcompact segment, where the Nissan Versa continues to kill the competition, proving yet again that what Americans are looking for in a small car is a large car. Kia’s Soul held off the Fiesta’s attack on the number two spot, while Toyota’s Yaris slipped to Kia Rio volume levels and the Scion xD slipped to the bottom of the chart. Meanwhile, few of the long-established names in this segment are beating their year-ago numbers, but look for that to change if gas prices keep going up.

The analysts RL Polk prove just how hot All Wheel Drive is right now, demonstrating that over a third of all vehicles sold in October and November of last year were equipped with AWD. Even more interesting: last Summer didn’t see the typical seasonal drop in AWD-equipped model sales. Polk’s Tom Libby breaks it down

At the make level, every ongoing make except four enjoyed an increase in AWD/4WD penetration in the September – November 2010 time period when compared to the same time period in the prior year. And the five largest makes based on retail registrations (Toyota, Ford, Honda, Chevrolet and Nissan) all experienced increased AWD/4WD take rates, led by Nissan (up 25%) and Toyota (17%). Lastly, in the 11 months of 2010 for which registration data are available, the two makes with the highest AWD mix among all those that offer both cars and light trucks, Subaru and Audi, have substantially out-performed the industry, with retail registrations up 21% and 20%, respectively, versus the industry gain of 7%.

Everyone doesn’t need AWD, but plenty of people want it… and it’s no coincidence that the two brands most closely associated with AWD (Audi and Subaru) are on sales tears right now. But will AWD continue to climb? Gas prices could put a crimp on the AWD party, but assuming for a moment that gas prices stay flat, where would the AWD fleet mix top out? Will the AWD mix ever hit 50 percent? More?

Keeping a nervous eye on oil prices? Curious how each increase in the price per barrel translates into price at the pump, and what impact that actually has on consumers? Zerohedge comes through with this handy primer on the real-world consequences of each increase in the price of oil. And what, pray tell, does the “Nomura” note scrawled over the $220/barrel price refer to? Why, the prediction by Nomura Investment Bank analyst Michael Lo, that if Libya and Algeria stop oil production due to unrest, the price of crude will hit $220/barrel. Are you ready to start spending an extra ten percent of your household income on gas?

As a site dedicated to arming consumers, industry observers and enthusiasts with as much worthwhile information about the world of cars as possible, we have to give it up for TrueCar. At a time when some automakers are dialing back the amount of data they share with the media and public, TrueCar’s regular data dumps represent one of the best sources of free information about the current state of the car market. And not only is it based on the analysis of millions of transactions, but it’s presented in a format that even the most laid-back of industry armchair quarterbacks can quickly understand. You can find the entire February forecast here, or, check out the gallery below for a TTAC-curated tour of some of the highlights.

The outgoing Ford Focus fell several spots in the C-Segment last month, and the Kia Forte bumped the Mazda3 down a bit… but as new products like the 2011 Elantra and Corolla, and the 2012 Focus hit the market, this crucial segment will see yet more turmoil.

Wherever you fall in America’s cultural geography, you have to cop to one cold, hard truth: trucks sell. In fact, in a market experiencing such odd automotive sales phenomena as no Honda Accord in the top ten, Altima taking second in the D-Segment and a Compact CUV in the top six, it almost seems like the only sure thing anymore is the F-Series and Silverado selling at or above 30k units per month. Whether you find that fact comforting or troubling, you’ll be sure to want to know the truck’s secret to success… which you’ll find just below the fold (along with a more extensive best-sellers chart).

(Read More…)

Throughout the month, TTAC tries to go back to recent sales numbers in hopes of providing greater context for the industry’s day-to-day decisions. On the first of each month, however, we get so overwhelmed with volume numbers, we thought we’d take this opportunity to explore the price-volume frontier. Inspired by recent rumors of a 120k unit production goal for the $41k Volt and the ensuing discussion of the BMW 3 Series’ unique position on the price-volume frontier, we thought we’d feel around the data for this mythical plateau. Sadly our unsophisticated graphing software (and overworked editor) didn’t allow for a more full exploration of high-priced vehicles reaching near-mass-market volumes, so we put together a “basket” of higher-priced, strong-selling models. And though we obviously cherry-picked a little, we did use four manufacturers to indicate an approximate “delta” between price (base MSRP) and volume (2010 numbers). Are there outliers to our “price-volume frontier”? Possibly. Did we leave out the most interesting area of the graph (the mass-market vehicles) Definitely. But in the process we have hopefully proved that selling over 100k units of a vehicle costing $40k or more is not a goal to be taken lightly.

Ignore the commas in the X-axis labeling, and you’ll see that this graph compares total sales volume for last year against each model’s year-of-introduction as we hunt for the missing links between product cadence and sales performance. Above, you can see that none of the major D-Segment competitors was introduced before 2007, and that newness alone is not linked to sales volume. In fact, in the D-Segment, volume seems to decrease with newness (although historical data indicates that this is a brand-loyalty issue rather than a consumer preference for older vehicles). Moreover, it appears that more recent introductions are merely narrowing the competitive gaps in the midsized sedan segment (although we’ll need new Accord and Camry replacements to tell if that trend is for real).

The compact segment, on the other hand, shows a far less surprising correlation between year-of-introduction and sales, as sales grow in a fairly consistent manner as you move across the x axis from older to newer nameplates. The major lesson from these graphs: Honda and Toyota continue to enjoy a “reverse perception gap” in which their aging models tend to most dramatically defy volume expectations relative to the age of the competition. But with more competition coming this year, as Chevy’s Cruze, Hyundai’s Elantra and Ford’s Focus come into the market, the consumer’s tendency to give Honda and Toyota “the benefit of the doubt”  could well be tested. And once perceptions start shifting, there’s no telling where they might end up.

We’ve been slacking a bit on our sales analysis over the last few months, but with the end of the year rapidly approaching we’re getting ready to look back at a year of sales, statistics and trends. To catch you up on the evolving US market sales picture, we now present the top six sellers in each of the six most important segments. Midsized and compact sedans, midsized and compact crossovers, pickups and “luxury low” (better known as “3 Series Fighters”) are all represented with today’s wide but shallow snapshot of car sales in 2010. Will the Sonata pass Malibu this year? Having beaten the Toyota Highlander, will Subaru’s Outback take down the Honda Pilot? Will the CR-V hold off the Escape? Best And Brightest, this is your cue to start prepping those year-end sales analysis talking points…