Filed under: Car Buying, Earnings/Financials
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The holiday season saw Santa leave some nice gifts for the industry.
Pop the champagne, don’t spare the caviar. The New Year has begun with a bang. Or, more precisely, the old year ended with one, December car sales delivering a much-needed boost to an auto industry still feeling the cold chill of its worst downturn since the Great Depression.
And the last-minute push past partisan gridlock that avoided an economic meltdown (can we all now abandon last year’s tired cliché, “fiscal cliff”?) suggests that 2013 will maintain momentum. By most estimates, we’ll see new vehicle sales surge somewhere into the low to mid-15 million range this year, and a new forecast by RL Polk predicts we could be looking at volumes of 16 million by mid-decade.
That’s great news. At least it should be if you work for an automotive company or supplier or have some auto shares in your stock portfolio. If you’re a car buyer, well, the story might not be so bright. Here’s why it all depends on where you are in the consumer food chain.
Let’s look at it from the industry perspective for a moment. The holiday season saw Santa leave some nice gifts for the industry. A long line of brands, including Nissan, Audi, Porsche, Subaru, Hyundai and Jeep, set all-time records last year. Bankrupt barely three years earlier, Chrysler Group wrapped up a string of 33 consecutive monthly sales gains.
While Toyota could claim Camry as the best-selling passenger car in the US, Ford could counter with the world’s number one seller in the form of the Ford Focus, while the F-Series again topped the overall US sales chart. And Ford’s Blue Oval was the only brand to top the 2 million mark in the US last year.
[HR][/HR] [RIGHT] *
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**Paul A. Eisenstein is Publisher of TheDetroitBureau.com](http://www.thedetroitbureau.com/) and a 30-year veteran of the automotive beat. His editorials bring his unique perspective and deep understanding of the auto world to Autoblog readers on a regular basis.*[/RIGHT]
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The good news and the bad news about December car sales originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 06 Jan 2013 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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