cl400

Fusion's fleet sales is over 30%.

last year fleet
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/201...edans-of-2010/

Rank Nameplate Fleet sales Fleet mix
1 Impala 124905 72.60%
2 Fusion 68364 31.20%
3 Malibu 63935 32.20%
4 Camry 56799 17.30%
5 Altima 43707 19.10%
6 Focus 42889 24.90%
7 Corolla 32622 12.20%
8 Sonata 21738 11.10%
9 Accord 11525 4.10%
10 Civic 8044 3.10%


Rank Nameplate Retail sales
1 Camry 271005
2 Accord 271005
3 Altima 185556
4 Sonata 174885 (debuted in late january, production shortage in feb 2010)
5 Fusion 150885
6 Malibu 134835


sonata's fleet sales is now under 10%. so i think the actual retail sales between fusion /altima / sonata is still very close. sonata has a production problem because of elantra is currently being built in alabama as well. hyundai needs 1 more production plant IMO. maybe not now but within next 5 years. and don't forget that toyota has 1200 dealerships. hyundai only has 800 and at least 1 out of 4 of them are still look like an econo used car dealers. there is a reason why hyundai only picked 250 dealers to sell Equus. Kia is even worse. dealerships do matter.

-J-P-L-

Agreed. All this talk about Lexus vs Buick. I don't get it. The real competition from GM is Cadillac and yet there is less mention of Lexus vs Cadillac. Buick is a pre-luxury brand. With Lucern being dropped, both of Buicks sedans start at about $27K. Less than a loaded Camry or Prius. Buick's next new car, the compact Verona, is even cheaper.

How is this Lexus competition?

dunnojack

i don't know what it is about this comparison, but comparing a buick to a lexus makes lexus sound cheap.

on the other hand, comparing a hyundai genesis to a lexus makes the hyundai sound good, but doesn't affect lexus so much.

maybe it's just me.

cl400

i think it's closer than you think


avg transaction price
http://blog.truecar.com/2010/10/15/l...-weak-economy/



BMW - $52,083
MB - $48,382
Cadillac - $48,312
Audi - $43,668
Lincoln - $43,074
Lexus - $42,902
Infiniti - $42,334
Acura - $37,538
Volvo - $35,671


there is no buick listed, but i think buick is probably at least on volvo's level.

Vladi

Maybe because Genesis is better than anything Buick offers so far. Lets not even talk about its big brother in the segment that Buick won't touch at all.

Even Acura and Lincoln have more expensive line-up then Buick so I am not surprised that Buick is selling better then Lexus, it should be when they have all three big cars in well under $30K price range.

Mister Two

Hmm...281 Volts and 67 Leafs (Leaves?)...think we can file them under the EV1 bin now.

BTW are powertrain breakdowns of individual models publicly available somewhere? Where does hybridcars.com get these detailed sales numbers of the hybrid models from?

spwolf

those numbers are purely due to slow production... both cars have presold in thousands, maybe even tens of thousands...

spwolf

(not saying they will sell great or that they are great cars, imho they are not, but media stories are bull)

GS69

GM Rebates, CEO Comments Raise Eyebrows

Last fall, the road ahead looked smooth for General Motors.

Just over a year since it sank into government-run bankruptcy, a leaner, meaner automaker relisted its shares on major world stock exchanges, bursting back onto the investment scene with the world’s largest initial public offering.

But just 4 months later some industry observers are expressing concern that the company's new driver, CEO Daniel Akerson, is unfamiliar with the car market terrain and could steer GM into a ditch.

Critics contend Akerson, a former telecommunications executive, is surrounding himself with agreeable subordinates from similar backgrounds, focusing too much on cost-cutting and relying heavily on incentives, such as rebates, to artificially inflate sales at the expense of profits and brand image.

Adding to the concern: The sudden departure this month of GM’s finance chief Chris Liddell after barely a year on the job. Liddell shepherded GM through its record $23 billion IPO last November, and his departure renewed concerns about GM’s stability and performance that many analysts had credited the automaker with having put behind it in recent months. The company has had 4 chief executives in the past 2 years.

“I’ve seen this movie before, and it doesn’t end well,” longtime Detroit adman Peter Delorenzo said his blog, autoextremist.com.

Things have certainly looked upbeat for GM of late.

In the opening months of 2011 sales of GM’s cars and trucks have surged, as the company grabbed market share from its rivals, according to sales data from J.D. Power and Associates. That would appear to bode well for the company’s future, and with it, the potential for U.S. taxpayers to recover the remainder of their investment in the company.

But some have questioned how those sales were made, and competitors have complained over GM’s tactics. They say the use of sales incentives such as rebates to grab market share is a shortsighted tactic whose use is worrisome coming from a company now led by an industry outsider.

GM has added hefty incentives to its cars since the start of the year, offering big rebates to current owners of GM cars, no-penalty early trade-ins for currently leased GM cars and bigger rebates for users of the GM credit card. The result has been a U.S. market share of more than 21%, higher than the company has had in years.

“We don’t see any upside to incentives,” said Eric Lyman, director of residual value solutions at Automotive Lease Guide, the industry authority on residual values. “It is manipulating the market and lowering the cost of your vehicles, which lowers the resale value of your used vehicle in the market,” he said.

That is the primary concern noted by George Pipas, spokesman on sales analysis for Ford Motor Co. “the focus becomes on the deal rather than the product,” he said “It clearly does have an adverse impact on resale value.”

GM declined to respond directly, but supplied text of a March 1 conference call with analysts by Don Johnson, vice president of sales operations. “Price or incentives alone do not fully explain a 70% retain increase and a gain of almost three full share points,” he insisted.

But the word in the industry is that sales slumped in March once the incentives expired. “The metaphor that has been used is like drug addition,” said Pipas. “If you depend on it to move sheetmetal it is not so good. Then your customers depend on it.”

Some industry veterans worry that Akerson’s unfamiliarity with carmaking -- he had a long career as an executive with Nextel and MCI -- is leading GM to repeat mistakes it made when it was headed from 1992 to 1995 by Chairman John Smale, previously president and CEO of consumer products company Procter & Gamble.

Smale's hand-picked North America president Ron Zarella championed the launch of the Pontiac Aztek, a dismal-selling SUV whose laughable styling brought it to a quick end.

Akerson similarly has appointed outsiders to some top jobs including the recent announcement that Dan Ammann will take over as chief financial officer April 1. Ammann came to GM from Morgan Stanley’s investment banking group. Akerson also has installed former Sprint Nextel executive Linda Marshall to head GM’s OnStar division.

As GM’s CEO, Smale put forward the belief that GM’s cars could be packaged and sold just like P&G’s consumer goods, with the differences largely in the packaging and marketing. The result was a product line of nondescript cars -- the Aztek notwithstanding -- drained of both cost and customer appeal.

In an echo of that past, Akerson recently told the Wall Street Journal that a GM car was just like the can of Diet Coke he was drinking during the interview.

“It’s a consumer product,” he said. “GM has to start acting like a consumer-driven, not engineering-driven, company. We sell a consumer product -- our can just costs $30,000.”

Industry insiders with a memory of the 1990s immediately blasted this view as a return to Smale’s failed strategy to commoditize a product for which a strong emotional connection is important to drive sales and to cultivate brand loyalty.

“The only difference between GM then and GM now is that this is a company that has only recently emerged from the abyss of bankruptcy, one that can ill-afford a single misstep brought upon by misguided leadership, even though it has the most competitive lineup (of vehicles) it has had in decades,” Delorenzo said.

At the time of his departure from the company last year, former vice chairman of product development boss Bob Lutz recalled the mess he found upon joining GM in 2001:

“Product development was all folded in organizationally with brand management,” he said. “This was done by John Smale, who believed that you could use the principles of the consumer products business in the automobile business, which has been tried before and it simply does not work.”

An emphasis on cost and speed of product development rather than on product quality and customer satisfaction resulted in cars no one wanted, Lutz said.

Under Lutz, GM won numerous car awards such as the North American Car of the Year for the Saturn Aura, Chevrolet Malibu and Chevrolet Volt, while cars like the Cadillac CTS, Chevrolet Corvette and Buick LaCrosse have won plaudits from magazine reviewers.

Additionally, transaction prices -- the actual sale price of GM’s cars and trucks -- climbed by $4,000 as the result of an additional $1,000 of manufacturing cost, said Lutz, making customers happier and the company more profitable.

Now Akerson says speed and cost are the aspects on which he will concentrate, telling the Journal that “during World War II, GM produced tanks and equipment within 4 years. Why should it take 4 years to put a car out?”

bitkahuna

iTrader: (20)

that last quote in particular, is the dumbest thing i've heard from a car co. ceo in forever.

wwii tanks are as complex as a lego brick compared to the autos produced today. i bet akerson does not realize the complexity of the certifications that must be passed (more than ww ii tanks i bet!) or the fuel economy targets they must meet (unlike ww ii tanks), or the safety regs, or the complexity of the software alone inside vehicles. his comments are idiotic.

your tax dollars at work...

-J-P-L-

Daniel Akerson scares me for GM's sake. What idiotic comments.

Just as GM is finally putting out a bunch of compelling vehicles, this guy is in place to screw the whole thing up like the bean counters of yesteryear.

Why car companies place non car guys to run their companies will forever boggle my mind. This is almost as bad as when Chrysler's then new owner hired Bob Nardelli a few years ago.

Trexus

What a waste of our tax dollars huh?

On another note. I have a feeling the CT 200h will outsell what the HS 250h has sold from January through March of this year. March is the first month the CT went on sale ever.

LexFather

Thanks everyone for the contributions! Please continue the thread for next month as I won't be logged in.

My dealer said they had a great March so hopefully other dealers did as well. CT is FLYING off the shelf they can't get enough to sell.

Edit

Let me add that a writer not in tune with the automotive industry would only compared HS sales to the MKZ today. Lexus purposely shipped no HS for 2011 until recently, dealers have been selling old 2010 stock for months now. There is no inventory, they are depleting existing inventory. The 2011 was jus added to the website but I've seen dealer allocation and Lexus is not shipping as many as in the past as they realize they overstated demand. I do believe the HS sold near 2,000 models when it debuted (at least over 1,000) so lets see the MKZ sell that many since it is a new model.

This is not saying the HS hasn't flopped it did. I am explaining though why sales today really plummeted as of late, there are no cars to sell. What is happening is demand is up as gas prices has risen and the CT is bringing in showroom traffic to the HS as well.