GM Market Share May Fall Below Milepost [20% Market Share]

The rapid decline in truck sales in the last month has pushed General Motors Corp. to the brink of a once-unimaginable trough: Its U.S. market share could fall below 20% on Tuesday when the auto industry reports vehicle sales for May.

Sales of pickup trucks and big sport-utility vehicles -- Detroit's bread-and-butter products -- have been falling for the past few years, pulled down by the slumping economy, falling home values and rising gasoline prices. But the declines accelerated this year and showed an unexpectedly steep drop in May, as gasoline prices reached $4 a gallon in many parts of the country.

That forced GM and Ford Motor Co. to slash truck production in the second half of the year. Ford also gave up its goal of returning to profitability in 2009 and has begun preparing to cut 2,000 white-collar jobs.

Amid all the bad news, GM's dwindling market share had been largely overlooked. It hit a record low of 20.5% in April, according to Autodata Corp. Given the direction of truck sales, GM is likely to report a drop in May sales large enough to pull its share below 20%.

Ford has traditionally had the top-selling U.S. model in its F-150 pickup, but the Toyota Camry is now nearly even in sales and could move ahead in May. It would be the first time the Camry outsold the F-150, according to Autodata.

Chrysler LLC, which lost the No. 3 spot in the U.S. market to Toyota years ago, could fall to No. 5 in May if its deep sales declines continue and Honda Motor Co. books a strong month.

Yeah... except from what I was reading in Automobile and elsewhere, Toyota was the only one who actually planned on bringing their JDN cars over - first with the Scions, then with the Yaris. The Versa and especially the Fit were (supposedly) last minute additions to the lineup in order to compete with Scion/the Yaris. Per my Nissan dealer, they weren’t actually expecting the Versa with the new Sentra. They weren’t expecting a vehicle in the Versa’s class at all. I would guess the Honda dealers were equally surprised.

Also, none of those three are actually new cars. All of them are actually Japanese market or European market cars that were brought over here. The Versa is the Nissan Tiida, the Fit is the Jazz, the Yaris is the Vitz or Belta.

Oh, and I don’t think anyone thinks that the Fiesta will turn around Ford, at least not anyone with a clue. What Ford would need to do would be to fire everyone in their US car design division that isn’t a Mustang engineer and replace them with the European or Australian design division. They design and produce much better cars than we get here.

Ford could turn themselves around by selling the Falcon, the Mondeo, the Fiesta (of course), the actual Transit (not the Connect), the Euro Focus, and of course, the aforementioned Galaxy. But, aside from the Fiesta, they won’t.

As for the Contour: What went wrong was typical UAW shoddy build quality. A friend bought a Mystique when it was new, pulled on the glove box and had the ENTIRE dashboard come away from the firewall. He’s got pics, too. The rest of the car had similar quality control issues. That tends to make people not want to buy your product in a hurry.

About the only US Contour worth buying was the SVT model, and that was because they were pretty much all hand selected and hand made.

Holy cow. I didn’t know about Contour/Mystique issues like that! Thought that kind of stuff stopped in the 70’s. I’ve heard about wiring harnesses tied in knots, beer cans inside the doors, and even Harley-Davidsons sent out without pistons. Dashboard detachment is a new one for me.

I don’t know about firing the US car design division. Maybe they could woo some designers from Honda or Toyota US over to Ford. I’ve heard that the American market Accord and Camry are designed mostly by Americans. They design quality cars, and they know what Americans want. (Plus a few of those Euros and Aussies could be thrown in for good measure.)

No, it didn’t end in the 70s. And management has NOTHING to do with debacles like that. That’s UAW sloppiness for you, pure and simple.

User merp on this forum is a friend of mine. He bought a 2001 Corvette targa coupe new. He consistently had problems with the thing holding an alignment and kept taking it back. One day he took it back to the dealer for a warrant alignment, went to get out, and bumped the steering wheel - and it *moved*. Yup, some UAW idiot had installed the steering column improperly and the loose/missing fasteners allowed one to move the steering wheel 2” in any direction. Nice, huh?

The car also had the following problems, in his own words:

“The driver’s door trim was off, and melted. Or [more likely], the adhesive was improperly applied and oozed all over the place.

“It ate oil, to a certain degree, about a quart every 3k miles. It’s possible that the engine was misassembled (missing oil rings, some of the F-body guys found they had none and were going through 2 quarts every thousand miles).

“The body panels had horrible alignment; the headlights didn’t seat evenly in the body when closed - lots of fit and finish crap.”

Yeah, and this is the GM/UAW “flagship product”??!?!?!?!?

Also, as late as 2001, S-trucks were coming off the line in Shreveport with beer cans welded inside the rear cab corners. Nice, huh? If your S-truck rattled, it was probably because there was trash welded inside cab panels.

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