Charts Of The Day: 2005-2014 GM Car, Truck, SUV, Crossover And Van Sales
A week ago we displayed a chart which showed GM’s decreased passenger car emphasis over the last fourteen months. Yes, GM’s U.S. car sales are slowing even as the manufacturer’s U.S. volume is increasing, but that wasn’t the point of the chart, nor was the chart (on its own) even capable of displaying that fact.
With strong pickup truck volume, a rebirth of the automaker’s full-size SUV portfolio, and steady sales from other utility vehicles, GM’s overall U.S. sales are better through the first two months of 2015 than they were at this stage a year ago.
But you deserve an even broader picture with greater specificity and more of a long-range view. So this week we have two charts, one for General Motors, and one for the industry as a whole.
Rather than displaying the passenger car emphasis, these charts track the sales of broad vehicle types over the course of the last decade: cars, pickup trucks, SUVs/crossovers, and vans, where “minivans” and commercial vans are thrown together. In GM’s chart, there’s also a distinction made between the company’s all conquering full-size SUV juggernaut. We didn’t make that distinction on the industry chart because outside of GM, full-size SUVs form a very small part of the overall utility vehicle sphere.
Perhaps the most interesting fact of all? With a two-month 15% decline in car sales to start the year and a 39% increase in pickup truck sales over the same period, GM’s cars are outselling GM’s trucks by just 10,216 units so far this year. The cars outsold the pickups by fewer than 1700 units in February.
Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures.
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@BAFO™ - Big land yachts were a dying breed long before CAFE cracked down on them. They've always been expensive to fuel, even when gas was under a dollar a gallon. And always hard to drive and park. You'd definitely get ridiculed for sailing around a big boat. But it'd be stupid to set FE standards for various forms of light trucks, same as passenger car FE. What market does that??? It's frackin' commonsense they'll burn more fuel than normal passenger cars, no matter what you do. And light trucks are a huge part of commerce too. So OEMs will game the system, but loopholes are there for any and all OEMs to take advantage of. It's all fair game. The regulations may give OEMs a "false impression" of what the market would be like if CAFE was not more lenient or "soft" on "trucks", but CAFE would then be creating a false market by forcing consumers away from their natural tendency for bigger people movers, never mind commercial uses for bigger vehicles, including pickups, big and small. But the Chicken tax is there for any and all OEMs to enjoy what little "protection" it may or may not offer. It's certainly not helping the Ridgeline, Titan or Frontier. The Tundra and Tacoma do marginally well. Think of what's missing from global "truck" OEMs and which OEMs would be hurt the most if the Chicken tax went away. Yes Honda, Nissan, Toyota, Hyundai, VW, Subaru, etc. would be harmed the most, though marginally so. But say Proton, Ssangyong, Mahidra, etc, all entered the US market, they'd enjoy what ever "protection" you speak of too. But it's a very wide assumption you make that they'd want to join in on a dying market, packed with fleet, cheapskates, and bottom feeders. Mitsu, Mazda, Isuzu, VW, Subaru, Ford and others, got to enjoy this "potection" and they still jumped ship on the compact pickup market like it was the Titanic. The pickup market is hotter than ever, so explain what you're talking about. That's why pickup prices keep rising faster than anything else. That couldn't happen if the market was "losing ground" to CUVs/SUVs.
Some interesting comments. Big Al From Oz, an interesting perspective on the external impact of regulations on vehicle production - CAFE, taxes, safety regs, etc. And DenverMike refuting the impact of the above. In particular, nullifying the chicken tax by producing domestically yet not seeing a sales improvement. I'm certainly not smart enough to reconcile this, but I enjoy reading the different viewpoints. One comment for Timothy Cain (and others), I find it a bit misleading to quote GMC and Silverado separately in sales figures, yet F-series are combined, I assume by F-series, you include all F150, F250, F350 etc. I get the argument that GMC and Chev are technically separate legal entities, but really ?