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Monday, April 03, 2017

Auto Industry Resorts To Biggest Incentives Ever To Slow Decline In Sales

The Last time automakers tried this was in 2009!

In a few days, automakers are going to report their new vehicle deliveries for March. TrueCar, Kelley Blue Book, and LMC Automotive are predicting total vehicle sales slightly above the flat-line compared to March a year ago, though sales were down year-over-year in both January and February.

TrueCar forecasts an increase of 0.2% year-over-year to 1.586 million new cars and light trucks, with retail deliveries (excluding fleet sales) growing 1% to 1.276 million units. J.D. Power and LMC Automotive said on Friday that they expect an increase of 1.9%, to 1.62 million units, with retails sales up 1%, boosted by record incentives.

If sales nevertheless fall, everyone will blame the winter storm that arrived in the winter – “unexpectedly” or something. And it is possible that sales might fall. There was no winter storm in February, which was one of the warmest Februaries on record. Yet, sales in February fell 1.1% year-over year. They edged down in January too. And sales in both months combined fell 1.4% from the same period a year ago.

It’s not like automakers haven’t been trying. They paid out record incentives to accomplish this feat of slowing down the sales decline. In February, the industry in the US shelled out on average $3,587 per vehicle in incentive spending, per TrueCar. It was the highest ever for a February.

We’ll get to the March incentives in a moment. Just a quick word on what transpired in February. The table below shows average incentive spending per unit sold:


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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Public is getting smarter. Why should they pay 10% - 30% more depends if the vehicle is priced at $18,000 or $40,000 plus. than the vehicle is worth. They are realizing the MSRP is as fake as a $3 bill.