General Motors has reported 28,218 sales of their new midsize trucks since the Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon arrived late in September 2014. Sales of both trucks have increased every month since arriving at dealers. Colorado volume in February was 177% stronger than it was in November; Canyon sales shot up 194% during the same period.

Neither GM pickup is the top-selling non-full-size truck in America, however, nor can GM yet claim the title when their sales are combined. Since October, sales of the top-selling Toyota Tacoma have increased 10% to 64,093 units.

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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.

The Volkswagen brand had arrested its sales decline in the United States. After 18 consecutive months of decreased year-over-year volume, Volkswagen sales increased in October, November, December, and January.

• Everything but the Golf drops

• Golf R returns

• Total Golf sales up 138%

Granted, those increased sales appeared only in comparison to the prior year period, when Volkswagen was in the middle of an 18-month downward streak. Compared with the equivalent period two years earlier, VW of America sales tumbled 12% in October 2014, 14% in November, 23% in December, and 19% in January 2015. Moreover, the reported yeear-over-year improvements were mostly slight: 8% in October, 3% in November, 0.1% in December, and 0.04% in January.

Perhaps Volkswagen was simply regressing toward the mean, rather than stopping a oncoming train in its tracks. February volume slid 5% in a market which grew 5%.

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After an especially strong start to 2015, Ford F-Series volume failed to increase in the United States in the second month of the year. The F-Series was outsold by GM’s full-size twins in February 2015, just as it was in the final five months of 2014. Through the first two months of 2015, however, the F-Series isn’t just America’s best-selling vehicle line, it’s also ahead of the GM twins.

Slightly.

By 327 units.

It’ll be the race to watch in 2015, not because there’s any real possibility of the F-Series being unseated – the Silverado would need to outsell the F-Series by an average of 2811 units in each of 2015’s remaining ten months to take the top spot by year’s end – but because 2015 is a major year for Ford’s truck line. (Read More…)

One year ago, when we began tracking the monthly market share movement in America’s full-size pickup truck sector, General Motors had just seen its February market share fall from 39% in February 2013 to 35% one year later. Their trucks were new, but GM’s volume wasn’t matching the heavily incentivized sales production of their predecessors.

The story is turned on its head one year later, as Ford’s transition into a new F-Series lineup has caused a slight slowdown in a booming category. Full-size truck volume jumped 8% in February 2015, but F-Series sales slid 1%. GM, on the other hand, reported 8811 more Chevrolet Silverado sales this February than last along with more than 900 extra GMC Sierra sales. (Read More…)

An unexpectedly strong winter impact slowed February 2015 auto sales compared with the expectations of forecasters but not in comparison with February 2014. The market jumped by more than 5% with the strongest gains coming from Jeep, GMC, Subaru. A number of lower-volume brands – Mini, Mitsubishi, Land Rover, Lexus, and Infiniti – all posted year-over-year improvements of at least 20%.  (Read More…)