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US Car Sales, the Worst in 30 Years, but It's All Stable

While communist China celebrates brilliant production figures and record sales, capitalist US looks at its car industry and you can almost see a tear slowly making its way around the pores of a worn out figure. And things don't seem to get better, even though some over confident analysts try to convince us otherwise.

A recent report by J.D. Power and Associates showed that new-vehicle retail sales during the first 16 selling days in April were down by approximately 33 percent and that the rest of the month will most surely go the same way. The bad way.

If you want to get technical, here's an excerpt from the press release issued by J.D. Power and Associates.

“New-vehicle retail sales for the month of April are expected to come in at 668,000 units, which represent a seasonally adjusted annualized rate (SAAR) of 7.8 million units. This is down by 33 percent from one year ago, but stable with the February and March SAARs of 7.7 and 7.9 million units, respectively.

Total industry sales for April (including fleet sales) are projected to be 853,000 units, which translates to a SAAR of 9.7 million units.”


J.D. Power and Associates wanted to make these figures a bit easier to swallow and added that the market does show signs of stabilizing. We're not quite sure what kind of stabilizing they have in mind. It's like saying that things are pretty much done for, but at least it's all stabilized. It won't go any lower than this, which by the way is the worst in 30 years. What a relief!

“Industry sales are starting to show signs of stability—albeit at levels near 30-year lows—as the retail sales SAAR has been at or near the 7.8 million-unit level for the past three months,” said Gary Dilts, senior vice president of global automotive operations at J.D. Power and Associates.  “In spite of continued supply corrections, we remain optimistic that coming months will exhibit stability with a modest increase in the second half of the year, which is in line with our 8.5 million-unit retail and 10.4 million-unit total light-vehicle forecast for 2009.”
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