Asian Cars Won 40% of Market Last Month June 2, 2006
Sales of fuel-efficient vehicles like the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic and Hyundai Sonata all rose 20 percent or more compared with May 2005.
DETROIT, June 1 ? Three decades ago, with fuel supplies running short and long gas lines around the corner, Asian cars won their first converts in the American market.
Skip to next paragraph Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press
General Motors says its sales declined about 16 percent in May, in part because it cut back on sales to rental car companies.
MultimediaGraphic: How the Industry Fared
Now that average gas prices are flirting with $3 a gallon, consumers are rushing to them again.
Sales figures reported Thursday showed that Toyota, Honda and other Asian manufacturers claimed a record 40 percent of the American market in May, when sales of fuel-efficient vehicles like the Toyota Corolla, Honda Civic and Hyundai Sonata all rose 20 percent or more compared with May 2005.
For Detroit companies, which have continued to aggressively market their costly new sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks despite the high gas prices, market share last month dropped to 52.9 percent ? their second-lowest in history.
It was their smallest level since last October, when sales plummeted after the companies stopped offering employee-discount promotions for all consumers.
Executives at Honda, which has long focused on fuel economy and does not sell any vehicles with engines bigger than six cylinders, said they expected to continue winning market share as long as gas prices stay high.
Honda reported an 11.4 percent increase in May, pushed by both the Civic and the new Fit, a subcompact that went on sale in April.
Richard Colliver, an executive vice president of American Honda, said the Fit is staying on showroom lots for an average of just eight days.
Some dealers, Mr. Colliver said, reported seeing customers follow delivery trucks into their showroom lots in hopes of nabbing a Fit ? something that has not happened since the original Civic went on sale in the 1970’s.
“My feeling is that it’s going to continue as people see what the price of gas is doing to their disposable income,” Mr. Colliver said.
In all, industry sales for May dropped 4.6 percent compared with 2005, according to Ward’s InfoBank. Car sales rose nearly 2 percent, but sales of S.U.V.’s, pickups and minivans fell 10.2 percent.
Toyota, the company causing the most trouble for Detroit, took a record 15.9 percent of the American market in May, when its sales rose 12.3 percent from 2005.
For the second month in a row, it outsold DaimlerChrysler, including Chrysler and Mercedes, to rank as the third-biggest company in the United States.
Toyota trailed the No. 2 company, Ford Motor, by just 15,000 cars last month ? equal to the number of Camry sedans it sells in nine days.
Over all, sales by General Motors fell 16 percent last month, in part, it said, because it has cut back on sales to rental car companies, which have been stronger than usual this year.
G.M. reported its first decline in sales of the new version of the Chevrolet Tahoe, which dropped 5.5 percent compared with 2005. G.M. has been banking on sales of its new S.U.V.’s and coming pickup trucks as the ballast for the turnaround plan it hopes will reverse its $10.6 billion 2005 loss.
S.U.V. sales also plunged at Ford, where overall sales dropped 6 percent. The compact Escape came only 18 vehicles shy of passing the Explorer, long the darling of Ford’s sport utility lineup, as its most popular S.U.V.
Ford said its car sales climbed last month, thanks to vehicles such as the small Ford Focus and the midsize Ford Fusion, Mercury Milan and Lincoln Zephyr sedans.
Like other retailers, G.M. and Ford Motor have begun offering gasoline discount cards as a come-on to customers of their big vehicles.
But the tactic may not sway many buyers, said Laura Ries, president of Ries & Ries, an Atlanta marketing firm. “People are looking at a bigger picture than a year’s worth of gas,” Ms. Ries said.
Detroit companies, she went on, had had only themselves to blame for missing consumers’ shift to more economical vehicles.
“Hey, they had plenty of time to see this coming,” she said. “Cheap fuel wasn’t going to last forever, because nothing lasts forever.”
Chrysler’s sales dropped 14 percent in May compared with last year. It said it planned to emphasize its vehicles’ fuel economy in ads that begin running this weekend. Commercials for Chrysler’s minivans, for example, will note that they get 25 miles a gallon, rather than focusing more on promoting features like flexible seating configurations and rear-seat DVD players.
Even though gasoline prices spiked after Hurricane Katrina last year, Chrysler’s executive vice president of sales, Gary Dilts, said buying habits were only now changing.
“This shift occurred pretty rapidly,” Mr. Dilts said. “In March, this was not on the radar.”
But, he acknowledged, “the imports reacted a little quicker than we did” in promoting fuel efficiency.
G.M.’s chief sales analyst, Paul Ballew, said G.M. was not getting enough recognition for its vehicles’ fuel economy. G.M., he said, makes more vehicles that get 30 miles a gallon than any other carmaker.
“By default, Honda and Toyota get credit in the minds of consumers on those attributes,” he continued.
As well they should, said Mr. Colliver at Honda. “We’ve spent 36 years building our brand around fuel economy,” he said.
On Thursday, Ford introduced a deal that offers no-interest financing and $1,000 worth of free gas to buyers of nearly all models. That is different from the G.M. plan, which is available on selected vehicles in California and Florida.
G.M. and Chrysler officials said they were evaluating Ford’s program but would not say how they planned to respond.
“We feel that just jumping into this incentive flurry on a month-to-month basis is not consistent with where we want to go long term,” said Mr. Ballew of G.M., which introduced the employee discount plan last summer to clear out big inventories of unsold cars.
Mr. Dilts indicated that Chrysler was considering some new discounts, however. “It’s going to be a competitive summer. It’s going to be a great time for a consumer to buy a car,” he said.
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- Author : arnold
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