The 2007 Mid-year fleet sales report is out! Let's look at what secrets it reveals. To figure out the yearly sales, just double the numbers and it will be pretty close. Many people always pipe about how one car sells a lot, or another car is increasing its sales greatly of the year before, but people never consider how much a of skew fleet sales put on the overall picture. For instance, the Dodge Caravan has gotten the title of "Best Selling Minivan" for who knows how many years, but in reality, the Honda Odyssey sells more RETAIL sales. The sale that actually goes to the customer vs. being bought in bulk for rental companies. Companies, especially domestic and even Toyota now, offer huge incentives for fleet customers to artificially "move" more vehicles -- Chrysler Group is guilty of this big time. Here are some stats of Chrysler Group:
Chrysler Caravan: FL52,000, RT43,000
Dodge Avenger: FL 10,000, RT2,600 (and it's brand new!!)
Chrysler 300: FL29,000, RT37,000
Chrysler PT Cruiser: FL 36,000, RT22,400
Chrysler Pacifica: FL17,000, RT17,000
Now let's look at who really is the really sales leader in each category after the fleet sales are taken out of the equation:
Compact Sedan: With fleet sales added in the Corolla pens in at 144,000. But when you take out fleet sales (the cheating way to gain sales), the Honda Civic surfaces as the top Compact Sedan seller with 128,000 retail sales while the Corolla only sold 121,000 retail sales.
Midsize Sedan: With and without fleet sales the Camry is the big winner. But, if you look, the difference between the Camry and the second place contender, the Honda Accord shrinks greatly. The Camry with fleet sales sold 192,000 while without them it sold 177,000. The Accord, OTOH, sold 166,000 with fleet and 156,000 without fleet. So instead of being a 36,000 unit differences, it's only 21,000. WOW.
Fullsize sedan: Boring, basically covered by Ford and its Police/Taxi Crown Vic. 91% Fleet sales.
Compact SUV: The CR-V wins hands down either way on this one. But you see the gap widen even more as CR-V Fleet sales are close to none, while others gorge on them. The Ford Escape comes to mind. The former "Best Selling in its Class" SUV sells 20,000 units to fleet while having only 50,000 true sales. This compared to the CR-V's 100,000 retail sales!
The Midsize SUV segment gets even more interesting. When looking at the chart, one may think that the Trailblazer is the best seller with the Grand Cherokee, Honda Pilot, Highlander, and Explorer coming in close 2nds and so on. WRONG. The Pilot's sales are 65,000 give 600 with fleet. The Trailblazer's proud 70,000 sales and all the other ones and widdled 15-25,000 units after fleet sales are subtracted. This makes the Pilot the REAL midsize SUV sales leader.
The Fullsize SUV market isnt as exciting. The Chevy Tahoe pretty much sweeps the board either way with 66-74,000.
I'm not going to go into the Luxury segment details but one thing I did notice is that along Audi was the only foreign luxury car maker with a lot of fleet sales. Maybe this is the reason why their "sales have reached record highs" in the past year. Cheapo way to do it. Cadillac is the other bad major luxury maker.
I believe automakers should have to post their fleet sales numbers every month for us to know instead of us having to wait a whole year for this release.
Here are the two links:
http://www.fleet-central.com/af/t_pop_pdf.cfm?action=stat&link=http://www.fleet-central.com/af/stats2007/cars_web.pdf
http://www.fleet-central.com/af/t_pop_pdf.cfm?action=stat&link=http://www.fleet-central.com/af/stats2007/trucks_web.pdf