Not Aussiely Influenced: Big Chevrolet Sedans Struggle All The More In January 2015
In September, we told you the Chevrolet SS didn’t sell as often as the dreadfully unpopular Cadillac ELR in August, the first time the SS failed to do so during the period of coexistence.
They tied in September before the ELR outsold the SS again in each of the following months.
In December, we told you that Chevrolet SS volume slid to a new low in November. With only 105 sales, the SS was outsold by ultra-rare cars like the BMW i8, Nissan GT-R, Volkswagen e-Golf, and yes, the Cadillac ELR.
Yet during the month of December, SS volume fell to yet another new low. Only 93 were sold, a 61% drop.
Surely this was a darkest-before–the-dawn kind of month, right? Surely with an available manual transmission (which is still not at all readily available, according to Cars.com inventory results) and a 168-day supply of cars overall at the beginning of the new year (according to Automotive News) the SS was about to shoot through the roof, matching or exceeding its peak of 350 sales in March of last year? Or at least the 232 SS sedans sold in January of last year?
No. Not quite. GM reported 115 SS sales in January 2015, a 50% cut compared with January 2014 results.
Over the last six months, Chevrolet only sold 691 SSs in the United States, down 59% from 1671 over the course of the previous six months. Year-over-year comparisons are only valid in the last three months, but during that period, SS volume has tumbled 52%.
Put it this way, agencies responsible for purchasing big Chevy sedans are far more keen on the Caprice PPV than consumers are on the SS. 1762 Caprices were sold in the last six months.
Granted, year-over-year volume slid 19% to 700 units over the last three months. With just 124 sales last month, January was the lowest-volume Caprice sales month since March 2012. Ford sold 2041 Explorer Police Interceptors and 678 Taurus Police Interceptors in January.
Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures.
More by Timothy Cain
Comments
Join the conversation
Ok, here in the south, where one might actually own a RWD vehicle, my local dealer has ZERO SS on the lot. The highest volume dealer in the area has a whopping THREE. No two in the same color. Checking a third dealer...ZERO SS on the lot. Let's keep going. At the fourth big dealer here...ONE SS IN TRANSIT! Let's go visit the dealer where I first went to find one last year. Oops, again, ZERO in stock. So, between 5 dealerships they have 4 Chevy SS in stock. Some big backlog, eh? Ever think maybe you can't sell them if you don't have them to sell? You "journalism" types really love a negative story, don't you?
You think maybe the whopping $2300 price increase from 2014 to 2015 might play in? An SS at a major pricing site has a less than $2,000 discount from MSRP. You know many Chevys like that? Think maybe dealers would rather sell fewer cars and make $5 grand with holdback rather than $1500?