Vehicle sales in total have completely fallen off a cliff, except for truck sales. They have only fallen off a small dune, because America doesn’t make any sense.
Let’s begin with Chevrolet:
General Motors’ U.S. light-vehicle sales fell 7.1 percent from January through March, but it sold more full-size pickups than in any first quarter since 2007.
GM delivered 618,335 vehicles, down from 665,840 in the first quarter of 2019, the company said in a statement Wednesday.
But sales surged 27 percent for the Chevrolet Silverado and 31 percent for the GMC Sierra. The two nameplates’ combined sales of 198,610 units accounted for 32 percent of the automaker’s total sales for the quarter, compared to 23 percent a year earlier.
Meanwhile, at Ford, truck sales were down 5.4 percent in the first quarter in North America. That figure feels different when you compare it to Ford’s SUVs, which were down 11 percent, and its car sales, which were down 36 percent, in part also because Ford has bailed on making cars.
Over at Fiat Chrysler, as it announced for the first-quarter:
Ram pickup trucks were a bright spot as sales rose 7 percent to 128,805 vehicles. Overall, the Ram brand rose 3 percent to 140,486 vehicles.
One curious thing is that the positive pickup truck sales only applied to domestic truck makers. Here’s Nissan’s self-reported numbers, for example:
And here’s Toyota, which posted similar-ish numbers to Ford for the quarter:
Honda Ridgeline sales, meanwhile, were down 29.4 percent in March compared with last March, though actually up 16.9 percent of the year, which I attribute to statistical distortion since very few people (8,125 so far this year) buy Honda Ridgelines or even know what they are.
My takeaway from all of this is that truck sales for almost everybody were incredibly strong in January and Febuary and part of March and the people who bought trucks from mid- to late-March consider them to be second homes, the preferred, nay, absolutely necessary form of transportation for the upcoming purge. I take no pleasure in reporting this.