Well, the numbers are in, and they don’t look good. May kicks off the summer sales events for automobile manufacturers, and June is truly the kick-off for the industry. Convertible and sports car sales usually get into full swing this time of year, but not this year. While almost all of the manufacturers’ sales were down from May, BMW, Jaguar/Land Rover (owned by Indian company Tata), and Hyundai had their sales increase. Of those three, Hyundai was up about 3,000 cars, Jaguar/Land Rover was up 800, and BMW was up about 1,300.
The significance of this shows up when you look at May’s sales figures and realize that this is more than a 33% increase for Jaguar/Land Rover month-to-month, and I believe it was fueled by the recent release of the all new Jaguar XJ sedan. Hyundai, of course, is just continuing its meteoric rise, owing to the new 2011 Sonata sedan and Tucson SUV.
Meanwhile, the current Big Three, namely GM, Ford and Toyota, in that order, each had over 20,000 less sales in June than they had in March. The troubling part is that it wasn’t their luxury brands which lost out, but the bread-and-butter brands of Chevrolet, Ford and Toyota, respectively.
Sales in June were down a little over 119,000, and only 2,000 higher than sales in April. This is disconcerting, especially as I hear that our economy is supposed to be flat or improving. It makes sense when the number of unemployment applications went up 13,000 last month. People are scared to spend new-car kind of money right now, which does not bode well for the automotive industry this year. Hopefully things will start to improve in July and August, because if they don’t, there are gonna be a TON of 2010 models sitting on dealer lots when the 2011s start arriving in force this fall.
Year-to-Date, GM continues to lead, but only by 100,000 vehicles over 2nd-place Ford. Honda and Chrysler are battling it out for 3rd place, with Honda in the lead by almost 70,000 cars. Nissan and Hyundai are within spitting distance of each other, and they have a huge gap over Volkswagen and everyone else.
UPDATE: While the graph says “May” on it, the numbers are in fact for June, 2010. I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
by John Suit