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Originally Posted by 90503
I know they spin this monthly report to look as good as possible....but headlining a 20% increase of the top sellers vs. a 7% overall decline has still got to be disappointing.
The Blazer??....only 3K units for the quarter? It has been announced since June of last year and seems like a weak sales number....Cadillac numbers seem low as well...
I say the SUV and Truck craze has passed it's peak and they will be stuck with a lot of expensive non-selling inventory....
P.S. I still think getting rid of the Impala will be a mistake they will soon regret...lol.
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Its very hard to spin 'overall sales are down' into a positive. Picking 'top sellers are up' was a clever way to try and hide it though. Probably the best point for them was bringing in an extra 8k on full size pickups.
I don't believe the Blazer is in full production yet. Only started in December, and that could very well have been part of some shenanigans to keep it as a 2019 model. For whatever reason, you can't start building a brand new model of something in the current calendar year. You can continue building, but you can't start. So, if job #1 rolls off the line December 31st, 2018 it can still be a 2019 model & the next 50,000 that get built in the coming months are also 2019s. But delayed by a day & job 1 is completed on January 1st, 2019? They're all 2020s now. It is very, very dumb.
Cadillac was actually the best brand for GM, only down 2% Q to Q. But thats a touch misleading. Everything at the brand was down, except for the XT4 which was up by 7000 units (vs not existing a year ago). Also, ATS sales fell off a cliff, down 86% to barely 500 units. It was outsold by the Buick Cascada & the Chevy LCF ... which I had to lookup & is their medium duty 'Low cab-forward' trucks (I think they're rebadged Izuzu's). It was the worst selling model in GM's entire lineup.
As for cars vs trucks vs SUVs vs crossovers ... at least at GM, I only noticed 2 cars whose sales were up. The Malibu (0.1%, or 47 more cars over 3 months) and Camaro (2.5%, or 91 more cars). The rest were down, and often by fairly big margins. Trucks were nearly flat in total, but still down a bit. Their SUVs were all down a little as well. Crossovers were the only group that was basically steady to positive last quarter at GM -huge when the company is down overall.
I really can't think of a scenario where there is a rapid, massive shift towards large sedans. If gas prices spike, people will want small cars, hybrids, or EVs -thus making canning the Cruze & Volt bad ideas but not the Impala. If auto sales crater in a recession, nobody is going to be scrambling to buy a new anything. And consumer preferences usually don't change faster than development cycles.
Also: for those that want to blame GM's sales on the plant closures, does this also affect Nissan? And Toyota? And Mercedes? They were all down by 5+ percent as well. My pet theory on product boycotts is that nearly all the people who say they won't be buying from company X because of <bad thing> probably were never going to buy from them anyway.
Or they eventually buy anyway since few people ever cared in the first place & there aren't any actual consequences for reneging on a boycott.