February Sales Snapshot: Truck Month Headed For A Letdown?
If there are two words that can’t be left out of any discussion of 2010 auto sales numbers, they are “incentives” and “fleet.” With a fleet sales binge well underway, and Toyota recall-triggered incentive wars raging with no end in sight, the spring Truck month rituals have been bounteous. And with sales of full-sized trucks through February trending flat and fragmented, they had to be. But will they make a difference?
Note that the biggest spiffs are reserved for Sierra, which is off nearly six percent this year. And that’s compared to the apocalyptic 2009 numbers.
Chevy is even focusing its Toyota-poaching offers at truck and full-sized SUV buyers… and not Chevy’s main volume (i.e. Camry) competitor, the Malibu.
But the biggest incentives in Detroit come from Chrysler, whose Dodge (or not) Ram is down 26 percent on the year to date. In addition to matching GM and Ford’s zero-percent and cash-back offers, Ram has revived its mystifying “Free Hemi upgrade” incentive. Perhaps it helps Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne sleep at night, as it’s a less obvious way of “buying market share,” a practice he loudly derides in polite company.
But most mystifying of all of this year’s Truck Month incentive-fests, was Ford’s. F-series has been running away from the competition in terms of volume, and Ford’s fleet mix indicates that at least some truck profit has already been sacrificed. But with Toyota leaning hard on car sales with finance and cash deals, every last truck sale is that much more important.
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- Cprescott People do silly things to their cars.
- Jeff This is a step in the right direction with the Murano gaining a 9 speed automatic. Nissan could go a little further and offer a compact pickup and offer hybrids. VoGhost--Nissan has laid out a new plan to electrify 16 of the 30 vehicles it produces by 2026, with the rest using internal combustion instead. For those of us in North America, the company says it plans to release seven new vehicles in the US and Canada, although it’s not clear how many of those will be some type of EV.Nissan says the US is getting “e-POWER and plug-in hybrid models” — each of those uses a mix of electricity and fuel for power. At the moment, the only all-electric EVs Nissan is producing are the Ariya SUV and the perhaps endangered (or maybe not) Leaf.In 2021, Nissan said it would make 23 electrified vehicles by 2030, and that 15 of those would be fully electric, rather than some form of hybrid vehicle. It’s hard to say if any of this is a step forward from that plan, because yes, 16 is bigger than 15, but Nissan doesn’t explicitly say how many of those 16 are all-battery, or indeed if any of them are. https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/25/24111963/nissan-ev-plan-2026-solid-state-batteries
- Jkross22 Sure, but it depends on the price. All EVs cost too much and I'm talking about all costs. Depreciation, lack of public/available/reliable charging, concerns about repairability (H/K). Look at the battering the Mercedes and Ford EV's are taking on depreciation. As another site mentioned in the last few days, cars aren't supposed to depreciate by 40-50% in a year or 2.
- Jkross22 Ford already has an affordable EV. 2 year old Mach-E's are extraordinarily affordable.
- Lou_BC How does the lower case "armada" differ from the upper case "Armada"?
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Crash.......I was not laughing at ford's tailgate step. I thought that it was stupid of chevy to make fun of a feature that they don't even have. Can't they come up with anything better than that for a commercial? As I get older the arthritis in my legs gets worse, making it harder for me to climb in and out of the bed of my trucks, and it mnakes me wish that dodge had that feature also!
http://forums.caranddriver.com/showthread.php?p=1597053