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All good things must come to an end, and so does the seven years of continuous growth for the sales of cars and light trucks in the United States of America.
After the economic downturn that started in 2007, the US market has been on the rise for seven straight years starting with 2009. Sales reached a record high last year, which meant that 2016 - and the following years - would have had to break record after record if this trend were to be maintained.
Market analysts now have absolutely no doubt that it won't happen, having actually unanimously cut the forecast by a few hundreds of thousands of units sold. According to LMC Automotive, the initial outlook of 17.7 million had to be readjusted to just 17.4 million following what it identifies as "recent plateauing" of deliveries and "growing economic and political risk."
What could have caused this sudden change of heart mid-year? Well, you can blame the Brexit for one thing, which nobody really knows what effects it will have on the global economy, but you can look closer to home as well: the US is getting ready for presidential elections, and the race is as close as they get.
"The conditions out there, while they're certainly not negative and we're still posting good numbers overall - they're just not going to be able to compete with those comps that we saw last year," said Jeff Schuster, LMC's senior vice president of forecasting, quoted by Automotive News. "Even if you run it at a good clip -- 17.5 plus for the remainder of the year -- you kind of get to where we're at forecast-wise, which just falls short of the record in 2015."
As a reminder, the US market sold 17,470,659 units over the course of last year, so the situation isn't bad per se, it might just be slightly less fruitful than it was in 2015. However, hope is still high for 2017: "[the chance] to get back on a growth track in 2017, I think, is still there," Schuster said. "And that's what our forecast reflects."
Market analysts now have absolutely no doubt that it won't happen, having actually unanimously cut the forecast by a few hundreds of thousands of units sold. According to LMC Automotive, the initial outlook of 17.7 million had to be readjusted to just 17.4 million following what it identifies as "recent plateauing" of deliveries and "growing economic and political risk."
What could have caused this sudden change of heart mid-year? Well, you can blame the Brexit for one thing, which nobody really knows what effects it will have on the global economy, but you can look closer to home as well: the US is getting ready for presidential elections, and the race is as close as they get.
"The conditions out there, while they're certainly not negative and we're still posting good numbers overall - they're just not going to be able to compete with those comps that we saw last year," said Jeff Schuster, LMC's senior vice president of forecasting, quoted by Automotive News. "Even if you run it at a good clip -- 17.5 plus for the remainder of the year -- you kind of get to where we're at forecast-wise, which just falls short of the record in 2015."
As a reminder, the US market sold 17,470,659 units over the course of last year, so the situation isn't bad per se, it might just be slightly less fruitful than it was in 2015. However, hope is still high for 2017: "[the chance] to get back on a growth track in 2017, I think, is still there," Schuster said. "And that's what our forecast reflects."
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