Car Sales To Hit Four Year High In March

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Mar 27, 10:42AM EDT

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For some reason, car sales continue to surge. Consumer spending has improved, but only modestly. The same could be said of unemployment. Cars and light trucks remain the second most expensive asset people hold after their houses.

There are several theories about improved auto sales. One is that Americans have held their cars for unprecedented periods and they are simply getting old. The cost of repairs for these vehicles is higher than the monthly payment for a new car.

Another reason is that car companies are offering very aggressive incentives. These include zero percent financing for as much as a year.

Truecar reports that the annual run rate of car sales will reach 14.5 million based on March figures. That does not approach the 16 million in 2005, but the cost to operate car manufacturers, especially those which are US based, has dropped sharply raising the leverage for profit margins.

Truecar reports

“We are looking at a record breaking month for many manufacturers in March with Hyundai, Nissan and Volkswagen expected to havetheir highest unit sales ever in the U.S., ” said Jesse Toprak, Vice President of Market Intelligence for TrueCar.com. “We also forecast that Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda and Toyota will have an extremely strong month, with some of the highest unit sales in years. Due to stronger than expected recovery, we’ve increased our sales forecast another 3.6 percent, from 14.0 million unit sales to 14.5 million unit sales in 2012.“

The numbers by major manufacturer

Unit Sales

Manufacturer	March 2012 Forecast	% Change vs. February 2012	% Change vs. March 2011
Chrysler	160,256	19.3%	31.2%
Ford	215,182	20.5%	1.4%
GM	249,887	19.4%	20.9%
Honda	145,594	32.2%	8.9%
Hyundai/Kia	126,351	31.4%	19.1%
Nissan	129,188	21.0%	6.6%
Toyota	195,298	22.5%	10.8%
Volkswagen	49,225	25.9%	33.1%
Industry	1,416,703	23.3%	13.7%

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.