#sales

It’s the Toyota Prius’ party and it can cry if it wants to. Two decades after its North American debut, the Prius is reportedly set to mark the occasion with a special edition. Whether or not the new reigning champ of the hybrid scene, the Prius’s own RAV4 Hybrid stablemate, is invited to the bash remains unknown.

Yes, the Prius has come a long way since its 2001 introduction, but time can either solidify a front-runner’s position or see it fall behind the pack, overtaken by changing trends. The Prius falls into the latter category.

Amid steep drops in operating profit and a dismal sales outlook, both Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz parent Daimler are appealing to the state in a bid to generate sales demand.

Both automakers appealed to the German government for assistance on Wednesday, Reuters reports, ahead of a meeting of auto industry leaders. With vehicle production making up a big part of Germany’s GDP, the shutdowns enacted to slow the spread of COVID-19 has left the sector hurting. That pain is expected to last through 2020.

Sales fell 27 percent. Brands such as Chrysler, Infiniti, Jeep, and GMC were in torments; shedding volume as demand withered. Subaru showed signs of relative strength, however, as did the Toyota RAV4. Passenger car market share was on the rise and…

Wait a second — we’re clearly not talking about the frightening first quarter of 2020. Scan the auto sales reports from 11 years ago and aside from a few familiar patterns, the U.S. light vehicle market of 2008 and 2009 did not resemble the U.S. light vehicle market of 2020.

Year-over-year, 2009 volume plunged 27 percent in the United States as a global recession melted home equity, eliminated jobs, and sent some of the biggest automakers in the world into a tailspin. Over the course of two years, auto sales actually dropped 35 percent, a loss of 5.7 million units.

Yet by 2012, three years after the collapse and three years into a recovery that would eventually produce record annual volume, 17 major auto brands (more than 100,000 U.S. sales/year) were selling in greater levels than they had in 2008. Meanwhile, seven other auto brands had yet to fully bounce back.

When venturing out of the home carries an extra degree of danger, automakers know there needs to be a reward for breaking self-isolation. Even if physically entering a dealership isn’t necessary, there’s still the current economic uncertainty to dissuade customers.

As we told you yesterday, U.S. auto sales are on the rebound, slowly rising from the rock-bottom position reached less than a month ago. While per-vehicle incentives are, on average, on the decline (the byproduct of a smaller pickup slice in the retail mix), discounts aren’t the only way to lure customers into a buy. There’s also loan rates — and it seems Toyota has finally arrived at that party.

It’s been a long month and change for most Americans, and by no means is anyone out of the woods, either employment-wise or health-wise. Same goes for new vehicle sales, which remain depressed after falling off a cliff in late March.

The difference now is that sales are rising.

Not on a year-over-year basis, with gains made over “normal times” tallies. No, nothing like that. But they have started a slow climb out of the pit after hitting rock bottom, which represents another brick laid on the pathway to normality.

In spite of considerations involving pickups, downsizing, and three-row utility vehicles, our family ended up in our second consecutive Honda Odyssey in the spring of 2018. This time, against conventional wisdom, we were early adopters of the new-for-2018 fifth-generation Odyssey. Against my own internal bias, we acquired a vehicle with a nine-speed automatic transmission, nine-speeds having disappointed me previously in everything from the Chrysler 200 and Pacifica to the Fiat 500X, Jeep Renegade, Jeep Cherokee, and Honda’s own Acura TLX and MDX.

And against conventional buying patterns, we opted for one of the five remaining vans on offer in the North American marketplace. Changes in the typical family vehicle buyer’s tastes have seen demand for vans plummet: segment-wide volume was down 15 percent in the U.S. in 2019; 2020 minivan volume will fall for a fourth consecutive year. Current minivan market share stands at just 2 percent, down from 4 percent in 2011 and 6 percent in 2006. In a market that (quite unpredictably) slid by more than 12 percent in 2020’s first-quarter, van sales were down 21 percent, a loss of over 21,000 U.S. sales.

It’s a bizarre outcome given the undeniable, incontrovertible, unquestionable fact that the Honda Odyssey is the best vehicle on the market.

Don’t expect the Present Year to come close to the sales tallies racked up in 2018 or the year before. No analyst foresees such a scenario; globally, LMC sees auto production taking a 20-percent haircut in 2020.

But the return to normality is underway in the U.S., aided by the federal government’s reopening plan (a set of guidelines to be acted on by individual states), but especially by the realization of governors that car buyers need some way to bring a vehicle home. Michigan, via an executive order, greenlit online sales on April 9th. Now it’s Pennsylvania’s turn.

This year stands to become one of those big “blip” years if predictions by industry forecaster LMC Automotive pan out.

The firm now expects global vehicle output to drop “more than” 20 percent as a result of both the coronavirus pandemic and ensuing recessions born of state-mandated lockdown orders.

Thanks to our friends at J.D. Power, we’ve been able to offer up weekly insights into the greatest disruption to the nation’s auto industry since World War 2. It’s a volatile time, with major changes occurring week to week, rather than over the course of months and years, and the disruption remains highly dependent on region and the legislative proclamations of various states.

Last week’s sales results tell us the great weakening of the U.S. new vehicle market has reached rock bottom, with no signs of further digging. It’s also not as deep a trench as the firm’s analysts predicted.

Obviously, Toyota plants in the United States, Canada, and Mexico are shut down due to the coronavirus (tentatively slated to reopen on May 4th), but the automaker’s Japanese plants are still going strong.

Come the month of May, those facilities won’t have to work quite as hard. Who’s buying, really?

Being in dire financial straights as it is, no one expected Nissan’s revised restructuring plan, due out next month, to call for Global Domination In All Fields. Ghosn is ghone. Regardless, after the rapid expansion and sudden contraction seen over the past decade, it’s still a bit jarring to hear that Nissan’s plan reportedly calls for a significant cut to its sales volume and manufacturing capacity.

More so than previously planned, it seems.

By “you,” we mean those of you not living in China. In that country, however, customers will soon have access to a Tesla Model 3 variant with more range than what’s available in North America.

As Tesla’s Shanghai assembly plant ramps up production and adds more variation to its offerings, Tesla is in a good position to dominate the country’s “new energy vehicle” market. It also frees itself from import tariffs that suppressed sales via higher sticker prices.

Rarely are week-to-week sales a useful yardstick of industry (or brand) performance, but the past month’s upheaval has changed that view just a bit.

We told you last week how, despite the U.S. car buyers staying away from dealerships in droves, pickups fared significantly better in late March than any other segment. The drop in sales for these must-have machines, while still steep, paled in comparison to other types of vehicles.

Not surprisingly, that decline continued in the past week. Still, with loyalty among domestic buyers sitting at a two-decade high, Detroit’s grip on what’s left of the market remains secure for now.

The question haunting every industry exec’s mind is: how long does it last? Few can hazard a guess, what with the coronavirus pandemic spreading through global markets at an uneven speed, with uneven impacts (in part brought on by uneven government responses).

Last week, analysts at J.D. Power issued best- and worst-case forecasts for the coming months and year in the U.S. market. This week, we got a snapshot of how the pandemic has upset markets overseas.

With some analysts now estimating the coronavirus outbreak’s cost to the automotive industry at as much as $100 billion, there’s not much reason to hope for any vehicle segment to trend in any direction but downward. However, domestic pickup sales have surprised us.

Despite the industry taking it on the chin overall, domestic truck sales are actually improving in the United States — at least by the measure with which we gauge domestic sales performance. Seeing the writing on the wall last month, domestic nameplates began incentivizing product like wild. Apparently, bargains ride two-up with the lead horseman of Pestilence. That, in combination with southern states being slower to enact social distancing measures, helped prop up truck sales. While that may result in the region having a longer recovery, it seems to have padded the market’s fall ever so slightly.