Unless one subscribes to a data service, getting US historical auto sales statistics is not so easy; Wikipedia only lists US manufacturers. But I stumbled into this site that has market share info from 1961 -2016. One can create custom charts, but only with five manufacturers for any given chart. So I lumped some fairly obvious ones together to create a few to share with you. The first one is for the Not-So-Big-Anymore Three; it’s also the most dramatic. How the mighty have fallen. And look how Chrysler/FCA bucked the trend of the other two, staying in a band of roughly 9% to 16% over the decades.
This one is for the the US independents. AMC was of course bought by Chrysler, which bolstered its rise in the late ’80s. And Tesla’s number are rising quite rapidly; its current US market share is probably around .6%.
Here’s where the biggest chunk of the Big Three’s former market share went to: the Japanese. In case you’re wondering about Toyota’s and Honda’s spike in around 2008-2009, that was because their sales fell much less than did the Big Three (and many others) during the carpocalypse. But their historical rise has slowed or mostly stopped, although Toyota is having a very good 2018 so far, up 7.4%. Nissan has been very aggressive during the Ghosn era. Mazda and Mtisubishi have of course struggled.
I should have put Subaru into the previous chart, as it’s one of the hottest success stories in the past 20 some years. Hyundai and Kia also enjoyed meteoric growth, until the past couple of years, when both have stalled out, largely by having the wrong product mix (not enough SUVs and trucks). Isuzu and Suzuki both are out of the US passenger car car market, but because the data for these charts included commercial trucks, Isuzu is still here in that regard.
Here’s what I call “the successful Europeans”. Unfortunately Audi is not listed separately, and undoubtedly lumped in with VW. And there may be some commercial vehicles in the mix, specially with Daimler (Freightliner), although Volvo truck is broken out.
And here are the continental European “failures”.
And finally, the UK, which has of course had a rocky ride in the US, but is doing fairly well now with LR and Jaguar.
Wow! There’s tons of fascinating information at the Knoema site, and not just automotive, either. What a great link!
Actually, AMC bogged Chrysler down quite a bit, as evidenced by the failure of the Eagle marque, which was just federalized Renaults and Mitsubishis anyway. The prize was Jeep, which is still the only consistently profitable thing Chrysler has had since they bought it.
Who would have thought in, say, 1950, that the sole surviving independent (at least as a direct legacy) would be Willys-Overland?
Indeed. Not only that, who would have thought in, say, 1950, that GMC would be a mainstream nameplate, competing with Ford and Lincoln? Much in the automotive world has turned upside down.
I like to think AMC reverse-took over Chrysler, much like Steve Jobs and NeXT did years later with Apple. Francois Castaing basically took over Chrysler engineering and the AMC mindset of small teams working together on a per vehicle basis, along with the cost-cutting mentality that came from a beleaguered AMC, directly caused the early 90s Chrysler renaissance.
So while Jeep may be the only consumer-facing success of the AMC acquisition, overall it worked out pretty damn well for Chrysler, until Daimler anyway.
Notice the slump sales of Toyota close to 2016, they got their mojo back after the 2008-09 recession the accelerator problem but sales dipped again around 2015-2016. I wonder if Hyundai-Kia had begin to attract some Toyota customers?
You may be right, but I suspect the redesign of the Camry in 2015 and subsequent redesigns of the Prius and Corolla did them no favors. Ugly, angry faced cars do not sell as well as they hoped.
The biggest problem for Toyota (and Hyundai/Kia) was the lack of light trucks in the mix, as the market shifted so strongly in that direction in the past few years. They’ve changed their product mix, and that’s why Toyota sales are strongly up again this year.
If you can’t build what the buyers want in the volumes required, your sales numbers are going to be affected.
It could be interesting to see the demographic of the age group. How long before someone said “This isn’t my father’s Honda/Toyota/etc…”? 😉
Sorry Paul. Toyota has plenty of trucks, SUVs, and CUVs. In fact, they had so many, they were cannibolizing their own sales… forcing Toyota to discontinue the Venza and FT.
Toyota’s dip is a function of 1. Competition ((Hyundai, Subaru), 2. No longer infalable reputation, 3. Very polarizing design, and as a result 4. Poor value.
I am actually a bit surprised by Ford’s drop. I would think that the success in F150 sales would give it a higher percentage in sales, but this is for auto sales, apparently. Given their earlier gambit and success with the Explorer and the SUV craze, they seem to be better positioned overall. If they do end up greatly reducing sedan sales, they will still be a success with just the Mustang and truck/SUV lines. I don’t think GM or FCA will fare as well in that scenario. FCA has Jeep, the printer of money, but Dodge, Chrysler, and Ram don’t seem to be selling so well.
I notice that Ford’s drop roughly coincided with the cost cutting implemented by Nasser.
Also note that the drop began with the introduction of the 1996 Taurus and Sable. Ford reacted to their failure by essentially letting them rot in the marketplace.
I thought they reacted by redesigning the cars a couple of years sooner than they would have otherwise. Of course, the replacements – while not bad cars, were pretty generic and it seemed Ford was perfectly content building fleet specials instead of competing with the Camry or the Accord.
” but this is for auto sales, apparently.”
I’d say the charts show total sales of all vehicles-
Since only about 12% of FCA’s product mix is auto sales, their current market share would be around 1.5% without pickups, vans and SUVs.
Great charts! The steep fall off of Fiat. I remember 128SLs and X1/9s all over the place here in flyover country in the 70s, then gone.
I have read that VW was on the brink of bailing out of the US in the early 90s, but this is the first time I have seen the market share data that was leading them in that direction. The number certainly includes Audi as share for the VW division alone now is 2.0%. VW has a target of pushing share to 5%, but there has been some skepticism expressed about that being realistic.
If you combine the sales numbers for all the VAG brands, worldwide, VW is the second biggest car producers. Number 1 is Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Group. Number 3? Toyota.
That info was in a recent issue of the British magazine CAR.
VW is the second biggest car producers. Number 1 is Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi Group. Number 3? Toyota.
Yes. It was the Mitsubishi acquisition that put Renault in the lead. For several years it has been VW and Toyota duking it out for the lead.
It would be interesting to compare with 100 years ago.
In 1918, Ford had 60% of the market, GM (all brands) had about 25%, and Willys had about 10%. All the others were near-zero compared to the big 3.
We’re practically back to the same big 3 now, since Chrysler is mostly Willys and Ford is mostly the Ford brand.
How would Ford by itself, all of GM, and Willys by itself compare now?
Much more interesting would had been what if George Mason, didn’t died suddenly and menaged to concretise his dream of a “Big 4” having the Nash-Hudson and Packard-Sudebaker going together into a bigger American Motors?
The wonderful what-ifs….. A bigger American Motors probably would have survived but struggled like Chrysler to find enough capital to deal with gas crises and economy, emissions and safety regulations. Maybe better on the gas crises if it kept small Ramblers in the product mix.
The Nash/Rambler, Hudson and Studebaker brands would have inevitably been folded into two or one, probably Rambler, keeping Packard as a premium brand. No more Ambassadors.
Mason’s AMC would have acquired Jeep in 1970 like real AMC did. A stronger AMC probably would have lived long enough to do a merger-of-equals with Chrysler.
We might have seen the survival of Packard, as Chrysler never quite pulled off a luxury brand of its own.
Maybe the resulting company could have held off the vultures that chewed up Chrysler. Would it have a higher US market share than today’s FCA?
“… keeping Packard as a premium brand. No more Ambassadors.”
I’d say “no more Clippers”, if they started early enough that the “senior” postwar Packards were still thought of in the same league as Cadillac. The Ambassador would serve as the Buick Electra/Olds 98 analogue.
1954 was the pivotal year. The devastating GM-Ford sales war was still on. Hudson and Nash merged in May, 1954, Studebaker and Packard merged in July and George Mason died in October.
Packard was slipping but may have still had the premium image in 1954. Packardbakers didn’t come along until a few years later.
(Ricardo Montalban appears on the screen) “Chrysler American introduces the new Clipper Imperial for 1976. This is the American Dream you’ve waited for your entire life.”
(Out rolls a flossier Imperial with a cormorant on the hood and varnished teak wood trim and corinthian leather scattered thru the interior)
“The Clipper Imperial. Now with fuel injection, solid state ignition and a 440 cubic inch powerplant. Only available in the Clipper Line of Chrysler American cars.”
It would have been awesome
The VW one is the one that I find the most interesting. Precipitous declines through most of the 1970s, bit of an uptick in the late 1970s (second fuel crisis?), followed by more declines in the 1980s and a big rebound in the 1990s. I imagine VW was also losing customers to the Japanese brands as the people who would have bought Beetles in the 1960s started buying Civics instead.
In a few years a Tesla versus Volvo chart might be interesting, just because I’d heard some predictions that Tesla will be bigger than Volvo here in a few years. Actually Volvo’s market share hadn’t declined as much as I thought it had in recent years. The chart does show a slow decline through the 2000s, but not as much as I expected, and it looks as if they might be turning around.
Lastly, out of curiously do the FCA numbers include Fiat branded cars post-merger?
do the FCA numbers include Fiat branded cars post-merger?
I certainly assume so. But they’re so small, it really wouldn’t make a noticeable difference.
The VW one is the one that I find the most interesting. Precipitous declines through most of the 1970s, bit of an uptick in the late 1970s (second fuel crisis?), followed by more declines in the 1980s and a big rebound in the 1990s.
My hunch is VW suffered GM scale hubris and convinced itself the Bug architecture would go on forever. Then they discovered reality and started a crash program to develop modern vehicles.
As usually happens with crash programs, what they brought to market looked nice, but fell far far short of the Bug’s reputation for reliability. The second gas crisis, and adding the plant in Westmoreland, lead to an uptick in sales, which soon faded, probably because they had not solved the reliability issues.
The Chrysler/FCA trend line is the most fascinating of all of them to me. I cannot imagine that adding Kaiser Jeep to the Chrysler numbers in 1961-62 would have moved the line much. And now, all these years later, it is clear that the lion’s share of the loss in US market share has been mostly GM with some assist from Ford.
The steep drop by Ford since the 90s is the biggest surprise to me. Up to about 1995 Ford had lost virtually nothing from its share in the 60s and 70s. The next few years will be interesting as GM’s line still seems to be trending down, if ever so slightly.
In the 90s, Ford’s passenger car sales went to hell. Think fish-faced Taurus, Contour, T Bird, etc. All were crashing.
It surprised me too, I figured the big drop for Ford started in the 2000s, and I had long been led to believe the Explorer, Mountaineer and Expedition cannibalized the sales of Ford’s passenger car lines in the late 90s and were able to coast steady into the millennium, but this graph paints a far different picture. Their SUVs were successful but they were still losing tons of sales.
Decontenting became really noticeable on their cars just about where the graph downturns, apparently buyers took notice.
The ovoid Taurus was one step too far, and it tanked the sales of their most popular model.
I still remember the praise lauded on that car, the interviews with the human-factors designers, who interspersed the radio and HVAC controls into a common (oval-shaped, of course) panel, ingeniously placing the most-used controls closest to the driver (which it turns out, confused the heck out of most people).
What I find interesting about the Chrysler/FCA and Ford lines is that you can plainly see where the introductions of popular new models turned their fortunes around. Chrysler pretty much bottomed out around 1980, but then there’s bit upswing in 1984 when they introduced the Caravan/Voyager. And the same thing with Ford in 1986 with the Taurus.
Really fascinating.
I figured I’d combine the major manufacturers into a single chart — which is below. This includes all current manufacturers who have achieved at least a 5% market share at one point.
This combined chart seems interesting to me because it shows the major manufacturers are competing in a very narrow range these days, with no clear dominant player, and certainly no contemporary version of the “Big 3.”
Nice; thanks.
Yes, in order to compete in the US market without being a niche player a healthy market share of at least 5-7% seems to be necessary. Otherwise the efficiencies of scale required aren’t there, and profitability is low or non-existent. It explains VW’s new strategy: go for the mass-market and aim for a 5% share or more. They have been losing hundreds of millions a year in the US because they lack the requisite volumes and efficiencies.
Manufacturers, will fight aggressively (like Nissan) to get to a decent market share, and then possibly reduce incentives. That’s what Nissan just announced.
“….without being a NICE player…. “, I assume that is supposed to be NICHE?
it is amazing how fragmented the market has become, and yet it also seems to be “coming together” under the umbrella of crossover.
Is this really any different than what has happened with (pick one) popular music, broadcast media, movies, clothing, etc. The use of computer aided design and manufacture, combined with changes in materials and sourcing, means that no one player can dominate in the way US manufacturing in the last century.
Technically, true, but only in a free and open market. The minute some government interference (via tariffs/rules/or other methods) comes into play, then one company can easily dominate at least one market. We here in the USA think ourselves immune, but consider just the implications of the Chicken Tax on our choices for trucks. How many here and on other sites lament the choice of a smaller pickup, like the ones available in Asia and other markets that we do not get because the 25% tariff makes importing them too expensive? And China, with their demands that any “foreign” brand be tariffed at 25% or locally produced in a factory half owned by a local partner, what are they missing out on?
GM can still claim “WE’RE #1!”
True, But only if they ignore the discontinuity between pre- and post-bankruptcy.
While not a hard and fast rule, it’s interesting to see that in many of the years when GM’s market share went down, Ford’s went up. It’s almost like the two were “stealing” each other’s customers (which to some degree they probably were).
Also, I’m surprised that Chrysler’s market share didn’t take more of a hit from the downsizing and styling debacle of 1962.
Look at the 1961 Dodges, Plymouths and Imperials, and you will see why the corporation’s market share didn’t fall that much for 1962. The decline began in 1961 the debut of the wacky 1961 full-size Plymouths and Dodges.
Absolutely fascinating! Demonstrates how complacency and hubris can bring major companies to their knees. Conversely, continual focus on the basics like quality and reliability for a fair price can win out.
Minor detail Paul, but PACCAR is not part of Daimler as you imply, it’s independent (Kenworth and Peterbilt here, plus DAF and a few others overseas). Freightliner, HQ’ed in Oregon, is Daimler’s North American heavy duty truck brand.
Of course. The corrected version is that Daimler’s share does apparently include commercial trucks, which is Freightliner.
I did a quick search and Freightliner sells a couple of hundred thousand trucks annually in the US. That would seem to be a pretty significant percentage of Daimler US sales. Oh well, one can parse these numbers too closely. Thanks for the link and the commentary.
Since there are a lot of Tesla’s in our area … including a new Model 3 in our ‘hood … I created a chart comparing Tesla with a few bygone brands that were fairly low volume, but not at all rare or exotic around here in the mid-60’s through mid-80’s: Triumph, MG and Saab. Tesla share is in the ball park with those at their peaks.
I am guessing, and this is completely anecdotal and based on zero evidence, that Tesla sales are very concentrated in geographic areas. In my neighborhood you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting one, but if I go about 15 miles away, they’re very few and far between. I would think there might be a similar pattern in any metro area.
I just noticed that the MG line on the UK chart extends into the early 1990s. I was under the (possibly mistaken) impression that MGs stopped being officially imported to the US circa 1980. Was it still possible to buy a new MG here in the 1980s?
I don’t know what to make of that. Error, most likely. It should have been absorbed into the BL share anyway.
Similarly, the line for Triumph ends around 1967 or 1968. I thought they were sold here until 1981 or so.
The Triumph line ends when Triumph became part of British Leyland, after which Triumph sales get combined with the British Leyland line. That should have happened with MG as well, but apparently didn’t. The data seems inconsistent in that respect, at least for the British makes.
I was curious about the UK chart as well. Is it possible MG included Rover which was sold in the US through 1991, right where the line ends?
I would have liked to have seen IH and Kaiser/Jeep in the US independents chart.
The MG numbers are probably not valid here. Taking a look at the spreadsheet version of the graph (which is viewable in the knoema website), it appears as if MG data is reported from 1961-64, and then 1980-81 and then 1987-91. The line in the graph version is continuous simply because it connects these unrelated data points.
I have no idea why the early data stops at 1964 (the BL merger didn’t occur til later in the 60s), or why it picked up again in 1980-81, or what vehicles are included in the 1987-91 data (Sterling?). But all of those questions mean the whole data series is probably unreliable.
Wow! What great data and thanks for the link.
In the early 1960s General Motors was very careful how it behaved lest it be broken up by the Antitrust Division of the Justice Department. Too many bureaucrats have never worked in the real world. Imagine what the US auto market would be like now if GM had been broken up then.
Peter Drucker recommended to GM that it spin out Chevrolet.
This offended Sloan so much that he wrote his autobiography in part to rebut Drucker’s view.
Drucker was right. GM hosed itself by failing to keep the brands differentiated. GM essentially homogenized itself to death.
For what it’s worth, I’m pretty sure that the data originally came from Ward’s.
I also have a spreadsheet of market share data that goes back to 1961, and that’s where I got it. As far as I can tell, Ward’s no longer gives away that information.