April New Car Sales on Track for Best Month Since 2008 (F, GM, TM, HMC, NSANY)

Auto industry research firm truecar.com released its sales and incentives forecast for April today, and the company expects the sales forecast to translate to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of new car sales of 14.6 million in the US during 2012. That’s up from a rate of 14.4 million in March and 13.2 in April 2011.

Total sales of cars and light trucks are expected to reach 1.196 million vehicles, 3.4% higher than in April 2011. Truecar.com does not provide a comparison with the adjusted rate for April, but does show that March’s unadjusted sales were 14.8% higher than April’s adjusted rate. For what that’s worth.

General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM), Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F), and Toyota Motor Corp. (NYSE: TM) lead the market share forecast for April with, 17.5%, 15.2%, and 15.3%, respectively. Chrysler gets 11.5% share, followed by Honda Motor Co. Ltd. (NYSE: HMC) with a 9.6% share, Hyundai/Kia with a 9.4% share, and Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. (OTC: NSANY.PK) with a 7.3% share. Volkswagen AG rounds out the top eight with a 3.6% share.

Industry-wide incentive spending has fallen by -4.7% month-over-month, but risen 5.6% year-over-year. The largest year-over-year incentive increases came from Nissan and Volkswagen, while Hyundai/Kia and Toyota are the only two makers to show lower incentives this year.

It appears that Toyota has completely overcome the marketing and public relations disaster it suffered a couple of years ago and the shortages caused by last year’s earthquake and tsunami. The other noteworthy item is Chrysler’s market share growth year-over-year, from 10.1% to 11.5%. Ford, GM, and Honda all lost share over the period, and only Toyota’s share gain was larger than Chrysler’s.

The truecar.com data is available here.

Paul Ausick