Fiat US Sales Drop Below 3,000 in March

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 1:20PM EST · Published Apr 4, 6:15AM EDT

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Fiat US Sales Drop Below 3,000 in March — © courtesy of FCA USA

[cnxvideo id=”655237″ placement=”ros”]Sales of Fiat, one of the brands of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (NYSE: FCAU), dropped to below 3,000 units in the United States during March, as the number three American car company continues to struggle with its worst performing unit. March sales totaled 2,922, down 5% from March 2016. For the first three months of this year, sales fell 11% to 7,231.

At the granular level, the situation was even worse in March. Sales of the 500L dropped 80% to 106. Sales of the 500X dropped 31% to 726. Partially offsetting those, sales of the new Spider reached 419. The model had no sales last year. Sales of the base 500 rose 12% to 1,671.

It has become harder and harder for Fiat Chrysler to justify support of the Fiat brand in the United States. Reviews of the brand’s quality have been very poor, particularly among major research firms such as J.D. Power and Consumer Reports. In the most recent J.D. Power 2017 U.S. Customer Service Index (CSI) Study, Fiat ranked last among all brands measured with a score of 739, against an average among all “mass market” brands of 807. General Motors Co.’s (NYSE: GM) Buick finished first in the category with a score of 874. Fiat also finished next to last among all brands in the recent 2016 Automotive Performance Execution and Layout (APEAL) Study.

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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.