Honda’s decision to delay a redesign of its Civic piqued some curiosity amongst our Best & Brightest, particularly Mark MacInnis who requested a five-year sales chart on the Civic and a few competitors. We’ve gone one better and worked up a 15-year graph of sales volume for some of the more popular compact sedans in the US. Of course a significant number of those pre-2001 Civics were hatchbacks, and Toyota counts its Matrix hatch as a Corolla, so the numbers are just a little skewed. Still, it gives a fairly good sense of where the major players stand in this important segment.

We live to serve here at TTAC, so when our faithful commentators requested a comparative graph of Chevy Suburban and Tahoe Sales from the heart of the SUV boom, who were we to say no? And sure enough, there are some interest lessons to be learned from the exercise. In 1999, as the SUV boom headed for the stratosphere, the ‘burban actually passed the Tahoe in terms of volume for one year. But the fad wouldn’t last: Suburban sales peaked in 2001, a year before the Tahoe topped out at nearly 209k units. The Suburban also fell further, suffering big year-over-year losses until a pre-gas-shock uptick in 2007, a year after the Tahoe recorded its first post-peak upswing. Counter-intuitively, the 2008 gas shock actually hurt Tahoe volumes even worse than Suburban, shedding over 50k units (or about 60 percent) compared to 2007 levels. Over the same period, the Suburban “only” lost 30k units of volume (about 55 percent).

Considering the Suburban so essentially captures the tenuous line between myth and reality in American life, it’s a pity we don’t have 75 years of sales data to put some hard numbers behind the nameplate’s 75 years of history. Luckily, our data does go back to 1995, when America’s whirlwind romance with the SUV was just beginning to get serious. Given that, as Paul points out in today’s history, Suburbans didn’t become popular as family haulers until sometime in the early eighties, it’s safe to assume that 1996-2004 represents the absolute high-water mark for the nameplate’s volume. And ye gods has that volume dropped off ever since.

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We love us some data here at TTAC, and since we’re already looking at a grip of sales data today, we thought we’d add this excellent infographic that appeared in Sunday’s New York Times to the mix. It depicts America’s per-capita miles driven on the x-axis, and the price of gasoline on the y-axis, and shows that the two aren’t as inextricably linked as some might have thought. As we try to make sense of monthly sales data and look for “the new normal,” this kind of data provides a crucial context for month-by-month trends. We hope you find it as enjoyable and illuminating as we did.

What’s wrong with this picture? TTAC loves sales data, but lately we’ve become a little jaded with our own efforts to provide a thorough look under the hood of the industry. And as everyone in the auto business knows, when the going gets tough, the tough get outsourcing. TTAC is proud to announce that we’ve concluded a deal with the fine data crunchers at Morgan & Company, giving us (and you!) access to their magical spreadsheet kingdom. Needless to say, we’ll be spending much of 2010 wallowing in the beautiful data in hopes of providing a better picture of the industry’s nuts and bolts. For now, check out this chart of Detroit’s market share swan dive since the early 90s. One of these things is not like the other…