Breaking The Production Lines! GM Sales Softer Than Expected, But Still Up 4%; Reannounces Production "Adjustment"

Last August, the folks over at the RenCen in Detroit were all atwitter over the fact they couldn't keep supply in stock to keep up with demand for all of those cheap employee pricing deals. It turns out that was a very good thing — cause it lets them say they were up this August over the same month last year. Thus, the General ended up selling 363,521 light vehicles here in the US — compared with 349,806 a year earlier — and that's a 4% increase. True, there was one more day this month — but the General doesn't want us quibbling over such minor details.

The bigger news was in the truck segment and, although the GM sales team stressed on the sales conference call, news which was "expected and announced at the beginning of the year" was...

...the production cuts for the fourth quarter, pegged at 12%, or 150,000 units. And to be fair, they did announce the full-year production cuts three quarters ago — but it's still a sobering number nonetheless.

Strangely enough — cars were down 0.5%, but hey — light trucks, the trucks folks thought would be down big — and for FoMoCo and Chrysler they were — those were up 1.0%. And that was with the GMT-800 product. Weird. Anyway, elsewhere in the monolith that is the General's brand line-up, Saturn's full brand numbers were up only 5.3%, but car numbers were up 34.3% for the month. Pontiac was sucking ass, down brand-wide12.1%.

In terms of individual models — the Cadillac DTS was up 31.2%, the Chevy Monte Carlo was up...get this...198.9%! But on the down side the Chevy Malibu was down 40.9% and the Saab 9-5 was down 38.7%.

Related:
Breaking! GM July Sales Down 19.5%, Obfuscation Wins! [internal]