Fiat Gets Slaughtered in December

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 4:10PM EST · Published Jan 4, 1:25PM EST

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Fiat Gets Slaughtered in December — © Thinkstock

[cnxvideo id=”625447″ placement=”ros”]Fiat Chrysler Automobile N.V.’s (NYSE: FCAU) embattled small car brand, Fiat, posted a December sales drop of more than half from to December 2015. The Fiat brand sold only 2,206 vehicles in the United States last month.

Fiat’s sales dropped 54% in December and were down 24% for the year to 32,742. Sales of its base 500 model dropped 36% for 2016 to 15,437. Sales of the 500L, the stretched version of the car, were down 59% to 3,118. The only vehicle that did well is the 500X, its crossover, but its sales rose only 3% to 11,712. Sales of its new Spider sports car reached only 2,475 for the year.

These figures beg the question of whether Fiat is a viable brand in the United States. Its small, cheap, high gas mileage cars have huge competition from every major manufacturer that sells cars in America. This end of the car industry has fallen out of favor with consumers as their tastes have moved to sport utility vehicles and pickups.

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Fiat’s quality problems are well-documented and have to severely dent its sales. 24/7 Wall St. has written about these problems:

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (NYSE: FCAU) brands usually do poorly in surveys of car quality. In the Consumer Reports’ Annual Owner Satisfaction Survey, all four of the company’s brands did poorly, and two did very poorly. …

Fiat Chrysler cars and light trucks have made similar grades in J.D. Power and American Customer Satisfaction Index studies.

Oddly, Fiat Chrysler executives have barely acknowledged the problem, and they have not set out any road map toward improvements. That should not give owners, dealers or prospective buyers much comfort.

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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.