No Surprise: Toyota may miss its U.S. sales target

With the gas-prices reaching record highs many automakers will miss their sales targets for this year or simply chugging them out the window as we speak. Toyota said today that it may scale back its target to sell more vehicles in 2008 in the U.S. than it did in 2007. Toyota sold more than 2.62 million vehicles last year.

This year Toyota was hoping to sell a total of 2.64 million in the U.S. along with a 5 percent increase in global sales to 9.85 million units due to strong sales from Russia and China. Toyota will review and announce any changes it makes in July.

Total U.S. auto sales are expected to fall below 15 million this year compared to 16.3 million a year ago. Ford said last week that they can even drop below 14.4 million for 2008, the lowest in 13 years.

We’ll find out in July how bad Toyota is hurting, but with fleet of small and more fuel-efficient cars we don’t expect Toyota to take that bad of a hit due to consumer preference as is the case with its rivals.

 

Source: Detroit News