Reasons behind the new car sales surge

Reasons behind the new car sales surge
Jose Mesa
José Mesa Auto Wholesale, LLC 

The data has been collected and it’s official that US new car sales were up in September from one year ago. Chrysler, Nissan and General Motors led at 27%, 25% and 20%, respectively. They were followed by Hyundai at 12% and Ford Motor Company at 9%.

Toyota Motor and Honda Motor Company were not so lucky since they were hit with falling sales of 17% and 8%, respectively. They are still feeling the effects of the earthquakes and tsunamis with limited inventory. It really is hard to sell vehicles when you do not have the product and because of this Hyundai and Nissan along with others have been able to sell more vehicles.

The average vehicle on the road today is 10.7 years old and this is about the longest ever. During this down turn in the economy that began in 2008 consumers have held on to their vehicles to keep from spending money. There comes a time when cars and trucks can only last so long before they are forced to go out and spend the money on a new one. This is exactly the case with many consumers out there today. Bigger discounts, nice rebates and low interest financing create new vehicle sales and consumers do like it. The price of fuel is also lower than usual so many consumers are getting back into trucks. Truck sales for General Motors, Chrysler and Ford were up 34%, 33% and 22%, respectively. In the last few years many consumers bought vehicles based on MPG but we are seeing the change back into trucks. Americans do like their trucks.

September put 1,054,061 vehicles back on the road and this is still one of the better months since the car market slowed way down to 656,976 in January of 2009. We are still a ways off of the best month ever of 1,807,992 vehicles way back in July of 2005 but if we can stay above one million vehicles per month we are doing pretty good.

José Pinomesa  is the owner of José Mesa Auto Wholesale, LLC.   JMAW is a retail auto dealer in Portland who has been selling new and used cars and trucks since 1992. For more information please visit www.josemesa.com.

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