Everyone's Doing It: Toyota Joins the Club, Slashes Rates

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.

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On the Rebound: U.S. Auto Sales Begin Long, Slow Recovery

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.

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Long-Term Update: Two Years And 28,000 Miles In the 2018 Honda Odyssey - Great Vehicle, or the Greatest Vehicle?

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.

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Locked-down State Opens up Online Auto Sales, Nudging Industry in Direction of Recovery

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.

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LMC: Pandemic, Recession Spell 20-percent Production Drop in 2020

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.

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U.S. Sales Slide Bottoms Out; Pickups Keep Things Afloat While Compact Car Customers Stay Away in Droves

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.

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As Demand for Toyotas Dries Up, Automaker Prepares to Stem the Flow

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?

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Report: Nissan Recovery Plan to Slash Sales Targets, Capacity

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.

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Long-legged Tesla Model 3 Revealed, but It's Not For You

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.

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Pickups Can't Do the Impossible, but They're Keeping the 'Buy American' Crowd in the Majority

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.

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Global Sales Impact of COVID-19 Is Staggering

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.

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Minor Miracle: Truck Sales Are Up

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.

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COVID-19 Fallout: U.S. Auto Sales Crater in Q1

Surprising exactly no one, sales numbers for the automotive industry in this country are grim. With stay-at-home edicts being encouraged in most states and various social distancing measures in place to help temper the spread of COVID-19, it’s understandable that a limited numbers of customers are darkening the doors of the few showrooms that remain open.

The first two months of this year were reasonably robust, so the negative numbers can almost entirely be chalked up to March’s challenging conditions (to put it mildly). As a programming note, the brands of Volvo, Jaguar Land Rover, and Mercedes-Benz won’t we releasing their numbers until later in the month. This explains the holes in our chart.

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Where Does the Industry Go From Here?

With all domestic assembly plants shuttered for some length of time and sales barreling towards zero in many markets at the end of March, the coming few months could play out in a number of ways. Sure, no crystal ball can be expected to return bang-on predictions, but that’s not stopping analysts from crafting a number of plausible scenarios.

As projected by J.D. Power, April looks like a wash for new vehicle sales, but the recovery could be more rapid than some fear. Or, just as easily, it might not be.

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Quarterly Sales Reports? The Last Half of March Is Where the Action's At

We’ll have a full tally of first-quarter U.S. auto sales for you tomorrow, but the expected declines in volume have far more to do with what happened in the past two weeks than anything afflicting individual companies in the months prior. If your gig is industry analysis, things have never been wilder.

Analysts at J.D. Power had their hands full tabulating exactly what happens when 265 million Americans are suddenly told not to leave their homes.

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  • Ajla If I was Ford I would just troll Stellantis at all times.
  • Ronin It's one thing to stay tried and true to loyal past customers; you'll ensure a stream of revenue from your installed base- maybe every several years or so.It's another to attract net-new customers, who are dazzled by so many other attractive offerings that have more cargo capacity than that high-floored 4-Runner bed, and are not so scrunched in scrunchy front seats.Like with the FJ Cruiser: don't bother to update it, thereby saving money while explaining customers like it that way, all the way into oblivion. Not recognizing some customers like to actually have right rear visibility in their SUVs.
  • MaintenanceCosts It's not a Benz or a Jag / it's a 5-0 with a rag /And I don't wanna brag / but I could never be stag
  • 3-On-The-Tree Son has a 2016 Mustang GT 5.0 and I have a 2009 C6 Corvette LS3 6spd. And on paper they are pretty close.
  • 3-On-The-Tree Same as the Land Cruiser, emissions. I have a 1985 FJ60 Land Cruiser and it’s a beast off-roading.