With the tenth month of the year 2012 just opening up its eyes, the United States auto industry recently took some time to look back at the facts and figures of September. In just 25 selling days, the American public planted 1,188,865 all-new light vehicles on their respective driveways, which is an impressive 12.8 percent leap from one year prior. Among those products, a total of 587,909 were light-duty trucks. Within that figure, 250,133 spots were occupied by the revolutionary segment known as the crossover. Blending an SUV with a car has clearly been a smart recipe thus far as the segment increased by 13.1 percent compared to last September and outsold the “American love-affair” also known as the pickup. As impressive as the truck numbers were, they still couldn’t best the car which found 600,956 new owners. Judging from September’s figures however, small is the new large as the little segment that could outsold the seemingly dead big car market by 240,288 to 870 units respectively.
Unsurprisingly, the Ford F-Series took the number one spot as best selling individual vehicle once again. What was a bit interesting was how it did compared to last year as the Blue Oval’s star only increased by 1.2 percent. Even still, it was enough to out sell the second place Chevrolet Silverado which, after only finding 36,425 new buyers and dropping 16.6 percent from September 2011, could benefit from the upcoming generation change. Continuing its recent wave of positive news, the all-new Camry earned Toyota a third place finish in US sales with 34,252: up a substantial 37.8 percent from last year. The Camry wasn’t the only Japanese sedan to see some green as the Honda Accord landed at spot number four and jumped up 56.6 percent. Given the recent announcement of the upcoming and all-new 2013 model, incentives might have had something to do with the sudden jump. Of all the top-place finishers, none saw a higher increase in September than the humble but stout Kia Optima. The newly refreshed sedan managed to sell just 14,304 units but compared to 2011, that number is 131 percent better.
Once again, Ford may have taken best individual vehicle but General Motors took the spotlight in regards to manufactures. The General sold a total of 210,245 cars and trucks in the U.S.: up by 1.5 percent. From falling by a small .2 percent, Ford came very close to being overtaken by Toyota as the two companies sold 174,454 and 171,910 total units respectively. Chrysler LLC, with 142,041 cars and trucks sold, increased by 11.5 percent compared to September last year and did so by importing a total of zero vehicles. One manufacture that seems to have found a nice balance between imported and domestically built products is Volkswagen. The German company managed to jump up 34.4 percent in the U.S. compared to 2011 and seems to be on the right track to achieving its lofty global sales goals.
During last year’s September, BMW imported a total of nine SUVs into the U.S. For the same month in 2012, the automaker imported 1,570 of the utilities. Not only did this massive hike earn BMW a total American sales figure of 21,761, it also earned the highest percentage increase seen in September 2012.
Source: WSJ
