Toyota, after hoarding chips, blows away GM for first time ever.
Ford Motor was the last major automaker to report US sales for June on Friday. Most others reported US sales on Thursday. GM and FCA don’t report monthly sales; they only report quarterly, so Q2 sales. Tesla doesn’t report US sales at all; it only reports quarterly global sales, and the industry guesses its US sales. The semiconductor shortage and supply-chain fiasco were written all over auto sales in June.
June sales for the industry overall fell to 1.30 million vehicles, down 14.2% from June 2019, after a strong March, April, and May (data by Bureau of Economic Analysis). In terms of the Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR) of sales, which takes the number of selling days and other seasonal factors into account and then annualizes the result, vehicle sales came out this way:
• June: 15.4 million SAAR, -9.5% from June 2019; except for the collapse last spring, it was the lowest for any month since January 2014.
• May: 17.0 million SAAR, -1.0% from May 2019.
• April: 18.6 million SAAR, highest total for any month in 16 years, +7.4% from April 2019.
• March: 17.9 million SAAR, +7.9% from March 2019.
Automakers have shifted production to their highest profit-margin units; and they’ve cut incentives, and dealers are charging record prices, over sticker in many cases. As a result, the average transaction price and average per-unit gross profits have spiked to records in June, as consumers have adopted a new attitude that I have never seen on dealer lots before.
Rather than haggle till they get the price down, or go on buyers’ strike as they had done for a couple of years during the Great Recession, consumers are paying whatever it takes to get a new or used vehicle as their whole mindset about inflation has changed.
But Ford’s total sales in June plunged 26.9% year-over-year to 115,789 vehicles, with retail sales down 32.5%. These are deliveries by dealers to their customers, or by Ford to large fleet customers, such as rental car companies.
Ford has given up on cars. The only “car” it still manufactures is the Mustang. It killed all its other car lines. And that sales volume just went to Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Kia, etc. And total car sales, after having collapsed every year for years, collapsed by another 82% in June year-over-year, to just 2,868 Mustangs and a handful of leftover Fusions that were still sitting on dealer lots.
F-150 sales plunged 30% year-over-year in June to 45,673 trucks. In terms of SUVs, Escape sales plunged 40% to 8,871 units, Explorer sales plunged 38% to 9,445 units, and Expedition sales plunged 43% to 7,453 units. These are all popular models with plenty of demand…read more.
