Tagged: car sales

General Motors reported U.S. car sales in January were down 6% from the same month a year ago.

But GM's head of U.S. Sales, Don Johnson, says comparing the two months is tough.  That's because the Detroit automaker boosted sales significantly last January with incentives. 

Johnson says the good news is GM increased its market share in the U.S. last month, compared to December.  GM had about a 19% market share last month.

Johnson says it's not possible to predict gasoline prices, but for most of 2012, he thinks they'll stay under $4.00 a gallon.

In 2008, when gas prices spiked suddenly, exceeding an average of $4.00 a gallon, consumers flocked to dealerships to buy small, fuel-efficient cars.

In the Midwest, it’s hard to get around without a car.

These days, people are holding onto them longer. The average vehicle is almost 11 years old and used cars prices are on the rise.

All this adds to the pressure on the bottom rung of consumers: people with bad credit.

For many, the only way to finance a car is at a Buy Here-Pay Here lot.  Here, dealers loan to deep subprime customers at interest rates up to 25%. Buy Here-Pay Here makes up more than 15% of used vehicle financing in states like Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. 

That financing goes to people like Willie.  That’s her nickname.

We’re driving around Toledo in her ’99 Chevy Express.  It’s got 130,000 miles on it.

The auto industry will grow at a faster pace than the economy as a whole in 2012. 

A new report by R.L. Polk says that faster pace will be largely driven by demand for cars in China.

Last year, the Chinese government ended subsidies for fuel-efficient cars, and as a result, car sales in that country declined from the breakneck pace of 2010.   

But Anthony Pratt of Polk says the Chinese middle class is still growing, as people move by the millions from the countryside into urban areas.   

"So outside of Shanghai, Beijing, (there's) many.....cities the average American may not even be familiar with, (that) would likely dwarf many of the Western cities we’re all very familiar with," says Pratt.

It could be time to crack open a modestly-priced bottle of champagne.

Analysts say, like the recent good news about retail purchases, November auto sales "may have run at the fastest pace in more than two years."

From Bloomberg News:

Light-vehicle deliveries in November, to be released Thursday, may have run at a 13.4 million seasonally adjusted annual rate, the average of 14 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. That would top the 12.3 million pace of a year earlier and October's 13.3 million rate, which was the best month since sales were helped by "cash for clunkers" in August 2009...

"November was a good retail environment for consumers overall," Erich Merkle, Ford's sales analyst, said . Consumers have been "sitting on the sidelines for quite some time. Black Friday provided that reason to get out there."

The head of Toyota's U.S. sales unit said there's a lot of pent up demand among consumers, "it's starting to push industry sales regardless of whether the economy is flat or going up."

Leading auto consulting firms are lowering their forecasts for U.S. auto sales in 2011. 

But it is unlikely to send automakers into a panic.

Some observers say the lower volume of sales means the U.S. is ripe for an incentives war among car companies.  

But Anthony Pratt with the auto consulting group R. L. Polk doesn’t see it happening.   He says a lot of the triggers that set off incentives wars in the past are missing. 

For one thing, U.S. car companies are making money at the lower volume of sales. 

They’ve kept inventories pretty low, too.  So there’s no, well, no incentive to give incentives. 

Higher commodity prices are translating into higher prices for cars and trucks.

GM announced their prices will go up - joining Ford and Toyota.

From the Associated Press:

General Motors says it will raise car and truck prices by an average of $123 per vehicle to make up for its increased oil and metal costs.

The company is the third major automaker to raise prices in the past three weeks because of higher costs. That is a sign the surge in crude is starting to affect car prices for consumers. Ford and Toyota both announced price increases in March and early April.

It's not unusual for a big snowstorm to hurt business at new car dealerships.

But it appears that February car sales in the U.S. improved over the same month a year ago, even though much of the country experienced more than one big snowstorm.                           

Car sales could be up 19% as a fair number of people trudged through snow-covered lots to buy a car.  That could be a sign that the pent-up demand that built up over the recession is now being released at a steady pace. 

Anthony Pratt, of PricewaterhouseCooper’s Auto Facts, expects a gradual improvement for the rest of the year.