July 1, 2008

Car Sales - How Low Can You Go?

Here it is - the results are in for the month of June! Front page - CNN - reports car sales being significantly down for the month of June. How far down? GM reported an 18% year-over-year drop, with Toyota sinking 21% (I'll go into that more), and Ford down a whopping 28%. Surprise, surprise. The article cites overall economic concerns, along with a shortage of fuel-efficient vehicles.

Which brings me to the real point of this post....there aren't enough fuel efficient/hybrid vehicles in dealers. The Toyota Prius saw its sales fall by a third!!?? You may ask how can that be considering you can't even find one at a dealer - there are actually wait lists for the car. It's really quite simple - they don't have enough to sell. Pretty ridiculous if you think about it. Toyota did not make enough of the Prius and now it's hurting them. Somebody is going to lose a job over that....

What do you think - is July going to be worse or will the recent rebate stimulus checks sent out by the IRS radically change car spending? Also, please comment if you HAVE found a new Prius!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hear that Hertz has an order in for 3800 additional Priuses, but since they are the largest buyer in the US, they'll be getting priority over the rest of us. Seems they can't keep up with rental demands for hybrids. Sounds good to me.

- Brian - said...

That's really interesting...last time I was at Hertz they did seem to have a few Prius models in! Hopefully Toyota will get the message.

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