I’m afraid our friends over at Gasgoo need a little parental oversight. Or the good folks at China’s premiere auto business site shouldn’t been drinking while posting. Today, they report that the Chinese government invested 5 billion yuan ($736m) in the “cash for clunkers” program last year. As of May 31, only 1.7 billion yuan ($250m) were handed out, with 3.3 billon yuan ($486m) left. No surprise to us. We never thought much of the program. In January, we said: “Due to the relatively young fleet in China, the impact of the cash for clunkers program on sales is expected to be small.” So far so good.
Now for a huge leap of logic:
“Therefore, the country’s automobile consumption in the next seven months will certainly be doubled,” say our friends at Gasgoo.
Whither the electrified market? According to this slide from a recent Johnson Controls analyst presentation [full PDF here], 2m global units by 2015 seems to be one of the models the industry is working on. And compared to other 2015 estimates, like Pike Research’s 3.1m worldwide number, it’s a fairly conservative approach. Still, there’s a long road ahead for plug-in and even hybrid vehicles. Toyota’s Prius, by far the best selling hybrid nameplate in America, sold about 152k units in the last 12 months. All hybrid nameplates sold 27,800 units last month [per Edmunds], for an annualized rate (non-SAAR) of about 333,600 or about half of the estimated 2015 market. Why that’s a problem, after the jump…
When Volkswagen CFO Hans Dieter Poetsch was asked to make some forward looking statements on April 29, he was reasonably confident that Veedub could improve sales and operating profit from the 2009 level, “but that’s it.” Now suddenly, Volkswagen throw caution to the wind and says that the company would “significantly” exceed last year’s results when 2010 is over, says Reuters. That assessment, made by a usually very cautious company, is bolstered by a forecast-beating performance in the first five months. (Read More…)
Batten hatches! Europe is on an emergency dive. According to data just released by the ACEA, sales in May dropped by 9.3 percent compared to May 2009. Our Ford canary in the EU coal mine was right again: May numbers were worse than April numbers. In April, the EU market had been down 7.4 percent. But that’s not the worst part. (Read More…)
We’re still taking email requests for Chart Of The Day [editors@ttac.com], but today’s chart isn’t one of them. This little data nuglet, of May volume by manufacturer, was requested by popular acclaim in the comments section of the last COTD… and was bound to be posted eventually anyway. After all, brand volumes are all well and good for armchair junior execs to wrangle over… but the armchair CEO demands volume by manufacturer. Let the harumphing begin!
ACEA hasn’t released European numbers for May yet (they are expected within the next days,) but in case you have a financial, business, or other interest, be advised that the results will be grim. How do we know that? By reading a press release by Ford Europe. Ford has consistently jumped the gun on releasing European numbers, and has turned into TTAC’s canary in the EU coal mine. What TTAC’s patent-pending GM indicator is for China, Ford becomes for Europe. Executive summary: May was another blood bath for the EU. Ford underperformed the EU market nearly 2:1. (Read More…)
Spoiled market watchers were disappointed by China’s less than red-hot May numbers: Passenger vehicles grew just 23.2 percent, the whole market grew 26 percent. Now here’s a number worth waiting for (or to induce a heart attack, if you have green leanings:) (Read More…)
Thomas Olesen wrote in to request a May 2010 brand volume chart. His wish just came true. Your wildest US-market auto sales questions can be answered too, if you just send your request to editors@ttac.com.
I know you are tired of China sales numbers. Just for the record: The final, official tally of all passenger vehicles sold in China in May stands at 1.04m units, up 26 percent from last year, says the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) via Gasgoo. The CAAM has the last word. Total vehicle sales hit 1.44m units, up 28.8 percent, says the Straits Times. With these numbers, we declare the TTAC patent-pending Growth-o-Meter as broken. Wuling’s lousy may numbers did it in. As a make-good, another round of the very best of Chinese traffic accidents. In color!
Any chance you could do $30-$40k entry-level luxury, ie BMW 3-series and everyone else gunning for a piece of that pie? For completeness sake, include cars that normally aren’t positioned against the 3-series despite being a similar price (Lexus ES and Lincoln MKZ, for example) just as a sense of their relative market sizes; I’d be curious to see how the sporty vs unsporty dichotomy plays out in the real world.
Approximately 1 million passenger cars (including MPVs, SUVs, and Minivans) changed hands in China in May, up 23.2 percent from a year earlier, the lowest rate during the past 13 months. That according to the China Passenger Car Association, as reported in China Daily. This is not yet the total vehicle count, which should be reported by the CAAM a few days later. The passenger car number usually is within a few points of the CAAM number. Is that good or bad? (Read More…)
We like to think of TTAC as something of the thinking (wo)man’s car blog: sure, we’ll try to drive the hot cars, but we’ll be just as interested in their history, sales and cultural context as their 0-60 time. One of the ways we like to help contextualize these, the most emotional artifacts of our material culture, is by breaking them down into their unforgiving sales numbers. In addition to our now-normal monthly binge of sales graphs, we will try to bring you one graph per day, illustrating a previously unexplored view of the market for automobiles. Today, we start with Luxury Crossovers, a segment invented by its current chapion, the Lexus RX.
What will tomorrow’s Chart Of The Day be? Email us at editors@ttac.com, and let us know what models, segments or brands you want to see compared.
Once again Detroit finds itself atop Edmunds’ True Cost of Incentive ranking of the top seven automakers [via earthtimes], as the domestic OEMs spent about $1.7b (or, about 60 percent) of the $2.8b paid out by the entire industry on incentives last month. Trucks were the most heavily discounted segment, with average incentives running around $4,650, or nearly 13 percent of the average segment sticker price. Saab spent the most by brand, slapping an average of $6,813 on its vehicles, with Lincoln coming in second at $4,987 per vehicle sold. Saab’s incentives equaled 17.1 percent of its average vehicle price, while Chrysler gave away about 12.2 percent of its average vehicle price last month.
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