Southfield, Michigan — Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, General Motors (GM) and Ford Motor all reported a surprise bump in March sales as more aggressive industry discounting gave car makers a boost.
GM said its March sales surged 16%, triple the gain analysts had been expecting. Ford’s light-vehicle sales rose 3.5%, outpacing the 0.8% gain analysts had been forecasting. "March [was] a strong start to the spring selling season for Ford and the industry," said Mark LaNeve, US sales chief at Ford.
Fiat Chrysler boosted car and light-truck deliveries 14%, beating analysts’ average estimate for a 1.9% increase. Sales for the Jeep sport utility vehicle brand soared 45%, driven by a more than sixfold surge for the compact Compass.
Most vehicle makers were expected to report small increases for March, which had one more selling day than the year-earlier month.
The annualised pace of sales, adjusted for seasonal trends, was probably about 16.8-million vehicles. That would match the rate in March 2017 and would be the weakest since Hurricane Harvey ravaged dealerships across the Texas Gulf Coast in August 2017.
"Healthy first-quarter numbers indicate the industry is on solid ground, but that doesn’t mean we can expect another banner year for new-car sales," Jessica Caldwell, Edmunds executive director of industry analysis, said. "We could see sales start to tumble in the high-volume summer months when shoppers aren’t seeing the deals they are looking for."
Ford sales rose more than expected on a surge in deliveries of F-Series pick-ups and an 8.7% rise in sales to fleet buyers.
GM is throwing a wrench in the industry sales reporting process by announcing a plan to end a 25-year-long practice of disclosing monthly results and shifting to quarterly releases. Kurt McNeil, US vice-president of sales operations, said the move would better separate "real" demand trends from "short-term fluctuations".
The switch by GM comes as analysts widely expect industrywide deliveries to slump for the second year in a row after an unprecedented seven-year growth spurt.
March may have been the first month in 2018 that retail sales rose from a year earlier, according to Thomas King, senior vice-president of data and analytics at JD Power.
"While this breaks a streak of three consecutive months of decline, the industry is boosted by a quirk in the calendar due to an additional selling weekend," King said. Incentive spending probably helped buoy sales in March, with average discounts rising $74 from a year ago to $3,849, JD Power said.
That was driven by deeper discounting on trucks and sport utility vehicles — up $160 per vehicle from a year ago — in an increasingly crowded market.
"We will be watching the pick-up truck segment carefully in March, as the new full-size Ram pick-up has gone on sale while the new Chevrolet truck has not," said Rebecca Lindland, executive analyst for Kelley Blue Book.
Bloomberg
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