A week ago we displayed a chart which showed GM’s decreased passenger car emphasis over the last fourteen months. Yes, GM’s U.S. car sales are slowing even as the manufacturer’s U.S. volume is increasing, but that wasn’t the point of the chart, nor was the chart (on its own) even capable of displaying that fact.
With strong pickup truck volume, a rebirth of the automaker’s full-size SUV portfolio, and steady sales from other utility vehicles, GM’s overall U.S. sales are better through the first two months of 2015 than they were at this stage a year ago.
But you deserve an even broader picture with greater specificity and more of a long-range view. So this week we have two charts, one for General Motors, and one for the industry as a whole.
Rather than displaying the passenger car emphasis, these charts track the sales of broad vehicle types over the course of the last decade: cars, pickup trucks, SUVs/crossovers, and vans, where “minivans” and commercial vans are thrown together. In GM’s chart, there’s also a distinction made between the company’s all conquering full-size SUV juggernaut. We didn’t make that distinction on the industry chart because outside of GM, full-size SUVs form a very small part of the overall utility vehicle sphere.
Perhaps the most interesting fact of all? With a two-month 15% decline in car sales to start the year and a 39% increase in pickup truck sales over the same period, GM’s cars are outselling GM’s trucks by just 10,216 units so far this year. The cars outsold the pickups by fewer than 1700 units in February.
Timothy Cain is the founder of GoodCarBadCar.net, which obsesses over the free and frequent publication of U.S. and Canadian auto sales figures.
