Sales of new cars, trucks continue to fall
— -- Sales of new cars and trucks this month are collapsing almost too fast to track.
The February sales pace through the first half of the month appears to be at an annualized rate of fewer than 9 million.
"Data collected from dealers suggests sub-9 million SAAR for February," says Jeff Schuster, forecasting chief for auto consultant J.D. Power and Associates. SAAR stands for seasonally adjusted annual rate, or total new vehicles sales if that month's pace held for a year.
That's well off January's 9.6 million pace, which had been considered about as bad as things could get. It was the first month with an annualized rate below 10 million since August 1982, says sales tracker Autodata. The last time consecutive months were that low was June-August 1982.
In 2008, 13.2 million new vehicles were sold. That was few enough to send Detroit automakers to the government for financial aid and cause even profit machines such as Toyota to forecast a loss for the year.
New car shopper activity the first half of February was down almost 6% from January at auto shopping site kbb.com, spokeswoman Robyn Eckard says.
"Nobody's buying cars," says Stephanie Brinley, analyst at AutoPacific. "If it collapses more than this, everybody will be back at the table" asking for even more federal emergency loans.
In progress reports filed Tuesday under the deal for those loans, GM asked the government for $16.6 billion more, and Chrysler said it needed another $5 billion to continue operating. But in calculating their needs, according to the reports, GM assumes 10.5 million total industry U.S. sales this year, and Chrysler sees 10.1 million.
Schuster says Power's latest forecast for all of 2009 expects an upturn later, for total sales of 10.3 million. But that's a "revised downward scenario" from the prior forecast, which itself was a drop from Power's original 2009 projection of 11.4 million.
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