America’s New Leaders: The new Big 3 – Toyota, Chevy and Honda

American's New Leaders: The new Big 3 - Toyota, Chevy and Honda

If you take a look at the industry’s first nine-months of 2007’s numbers you will notice that there has been a massive reordering of who’s in lead and who has fallen behind.

Toyota leads the market leaving Ford and GM brands in the dust; Cadillac has passed its fellow brand Buick in sales; and of course Lexus, leads the market in import luxury with sales figure that are close to those of the mass-market Pontiac in unit sales.

So far this year, Toyota is the undisputed king of car sales by a huge margin. The Big 3 brands of car sales are now Toyota, Chevy and Honda. Ford has fallen to number four as Nissan creeps up behind it at number give. Only five years ago, Ford was number one in car sales; however in the first nine-months of 2007 Ford barely reached half of Toyota’s car sales.

Number 2 Chevrolet is holding its spot due to a 100,000 units lead over the Toyota Camry with Honda creeping up behind it at number 3. Chevrolet hopes that it can hold the spot with the sales of the 2008 Malibu introduced last month.

Lexus, BMW, Mercedes, Infiniti and Audi are all up in sales this year. However Lexus is the king of import luxury brands reaching the best sales year a luxury brand has ever had in the U.S. That spot is currently held by Cadillac.

Even though GM as a whole still holds the number one spot in the U.S., if current trends keep up, Toyota could easily work its way to the number 1 spot by 2011.

 

Source: Automotive News (Subscription Required)

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