#sales

While I don’t particularly agree with all the criticisms Lee Iacocca has thrown at Japan, his most polarizing claim (published in Playboy, no less) — that its citizens certainly know Jeep because “they saw enough of them in World War II” — has bizarrely continued to ring true. As far as American automotive brands go, Jeep has been Japan’s favorite for a while. And it only needed to tamp down its relationship to “The Big One” slightly to get there.

However, the sales game is always relative.

Despite being one of the fastest-growing brands on the market, Jeep only netted itself 13,360 deliveries in Japan for 2019. But consistent growth since 2013 has to account for something, especially when the overall market is performing so poorly. At the very least, it shows American brands can make some amount of headway on a nut Iacocca believed uncrackable.

A near-future of rapidly rising sales is a vision Genesis brand chief William Lee wants to see come true. It has to, if Hyundai’s premium marque wants to stick around.

With its American dealer strategy now up and running and the public debut of the brand’s first crossover vehicle just days away, Lee claims he’s confident great things lie ahead. Is it bad luck for a fledgling marque to issue sales predictions? If it is, Lee isn’t aware.

While Jeep may be a big money maker for Fiat Chrysler, the rugged off-road brand’s products aren’t all doing fabulously. A downturn in consumer enthusiasm has left the automaker with too many Cherokees in its inventory, so something has to give.

Belvidere Assembly goes dark for two weeks this month.

Rich people are just like us: they put on their pants one leg at a time, they walk upright, and they enjoy winters at their villa in the south of France. Okay, maybe they aren’t exactly like us. My villa is in Spain.

One other thing they do? Buy cars, apparently. A quick perusal of 2019 total year sales numbers show that while mainstream makes like Ford and Chevy fell into the red compared to the same timeframe one year ago, there’s no shortage of growth at the big money brands.

The annual sales volumes of Volkswagen’s U.S. arm, if placed on a line graph, would resemble deep sea swells, rising and falling by significant amounts as the company reinvents itself again and again. Today, Volkswagen of America is an SUV-heavy automaker that really wants you to think about eco-conscious electric cars.

The utility vehicles are here. More are on the way, but so too are a selection of EVs. With 2019 sales now on the books, we can look at the current wave and speculate as to its final height.

The other day, we told you about Subaru bucking the industry’s cooling trend to scratch out yet another record year-end sales tally. A full year of Ascent production catapulted the brand over a hurdle that, without the new model, it would have failed to clear.

Nothing beats a new three-row crossover for hiking sales, boosting ATPs, and growing margins.

It’s something the members of Hyundai Motor Group know well. Both Hyundai and Kia have a brace of crossovers to thank for the solid sales gains enjoyed in 2019.

Aston Martin was not under the illusion that 2019 would be a stellar year. After issuing a recent profit warning, the British automaker fired off another this week after realizing it ended up being a worse year than initially feared. Aston’s stock has lost 3 billion pounds in market value since the company’s initial public offering in 2018.

While retail sales were technically up last year, climbing 12 percent, total wholesales fell by 7 percent. According to the manufacturer, gains were made thanks to the redesigned Vantage (introduced in 2018). Unfortunately, that also caused some headaches. Despite being a six-figure car, at Aston Martin the model is technically an entry level, and its high take rate actually resulted in a lower average selling price across Aston’s business for Q4. Combine that with an overall increase in leased vehicles upping financing costs and you’re beginning to see part of the problem.

With full-year sales stats now available from each of the Detroit Three, we can see how the leaders in the critically important full-size pickup segment faired in the eventful year of 2019.

And it was an eventful year, what with new full-sizers on offer from Ram, Chevrolet, and GMC, and revamped Heavy Dutys from both Ram and GM entering the fray. (GM’s big guys landed for the 2020 model year, with Ford’s redesigned 2020 Super Duty series arriving shortly after the launch of its Detroit rival.)

It’s no secret that Ram did well last year, but how did it stack up next to the perennial front-runner?

Not Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, mind you, but Chrysler. The brand. The maker of such diverse nameplates as the 300, which debuted in 2004, or the Pacifica and its ilk. Or the — wait, no, that’s it.

It’s easy to poke fun at Chrysler The Brand these days, what with Jeep and Ram doing the heavy lifting in terms of sales. As Matthew Guy recently told you, Ram bench-pressed some exceptionally heavy stacks this past year, sailing to new sales heights on the strength of two full-size pickups and a new HD model. Chrysler, barely mentioned in FCA’s recent five-year product plan, sunk to its lowest standing in decades.

Get this brand a new product that’s not just a variant of an existing minivan.

Too bad about the others. After admitting that it probably should have reconsidered the new-for-2019 Mazda 3’s U.S. pricing strategy, the Hiroshima-based automaker can sit back and look at last year’s results in full. Topping that page is a 7.2 percent sales decline — the result of volume slippage among all nameplates but one.

Nothing beats a compact crossover for surefire popularity.

Many talking heads and auto journos, your author included, theorized the American car market in 2019 would fail to sell in excess of 17 million new vehicles for the first time in several years. However, thanks to a late-year push, a total of 17.11 million copies of fresh metal moved off showroom floors and onto America’s highways.

If you’re keeping count, and many are, this makes for the fifth consecutive year the industry topped the 17 million mark. The only other two calendar years it did so was 2000 and 2001. We can draw these conclusions now that Ford has gotten off its Blue Oval butt and posted its numbers, a full 48 hours after just about everyone else.

You read on Friday how Subaru exceeded its U.S. sales goal for 2019 by 117 vehicles, pushing its American volume to the highest point in the automaker’s history — up 2.9 percent from 2018, and more than 200 percent greater than its tally just a decade prior. A hard thing to achieve in a market that cooled off in 2019.

Subaru doesn’t see last year as a high water mark, however. For 2020, the brand has even loftier expectations, but everything will have to fall into place for it to happen.

Back in early October, after Subaru’s 93-month streak of year-over-year sales increases came to an end for a variety of reasons, Subaru of America CEO Thomas J. Doll said the brand was still “on target to achieve our 700,000-vehicle sales goal for 2019, marking 12 consecutive years of sales increases.”

Despite a cooling new vehicle market, Subaru’s meteoric rise in the U.S. and its stable of all-wheel drive vehicles made the sales target appear an achievable goal. Turns out it was.

Subaru just barely cleared the bar, earning it another record.

It was an all-around bad year for Nissan, both globally and in the United States. Turmoil and triage was the order of the day, as the automaker was rocked by the arrest and ouster of its former chairman, an escape artist known as Carlos Ghosn, as well as bad blood and intrigue among members of the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance.

Cooling auto sales in most developed markets further hurt the brand’s profitability, even as the automaker strove to reverse its incentive-fueled market share push in favor of a sustainable path forward. That path is proving rocky, despite Nissan’s willingness to stay the course.

The brand’s 2019 U.S. sales are horrendous.

Not that long ago, we posited that the Toyota Corolla and Honda Civic would buck the declining passenger car trend and eke out a sales win in 2019. Several things were working in the models’ favor — name recognition, diversity of choice, and the elimination of domestic rivals.

In this market, in this era, breaking even counts as a win. And that’s just what the Corolla and Civic did last year.