Clunkers boosts Ford sales; GM, Chrysler fall

DETROIT (AP) -- The Cash for Clunkers program boosted sales at Ford,
Toyota and Honda in August as consumers snapped up their fuel-
efficient offerings, but rivals Chrysler Group LLC and General Motors
Co. withstood another month of falling sales.

Ford Motor Co. sold 181,826 cars and light trucks compared with
115,117 in August 2008, when high gas prices and growing economic
uncertainty kept people away from showrooms.

Meanwhile, low supplies of fuel-efficient vehicles at Chrysler kept
the automaker from benefiting more from the clunkers program, whose
rebates encouraged customers to buy gas sippers in exchange for
guzzlers with gas mileage of 18 mpg or less.

Chrysler sales fell 15 percent to 93,222 units.

 

Is that maybe why they stopped the program abruptly after approving a
couple more billion for it? The government's two ass-kisser car
companies weren't benefiting in spite of the non-free market deck being
stacked in their favor.

 

My 10-year-old Chrysler 300m gets 30 mpg on the highway, and passes it's
emissions tests by a wide margin.

It's too bad that Chrysler replaced the 300m with a 2-ton version
designed by Fisher Price.

If Chrysler had ANY brains, they'd bring back the LH platform and bring
the 300N concept into production.

 

No, the stopped it because the new money was used up that quickly.

 

Wow - that was fast. Have the dealers started to see the money yet?

 

From all the news I hear it's pretty slow. It's taking as much as 30
days to get the paperwork thru the system.

 

Ashton,
From what I heard, the program was actually a success, almost 700K cars
sold. A friend of my wife's husband works at a Kia dealer and lots of
people were in buying the low-line Rio and other low price cars, using
the full $4500. Dealers will get the money, but it takes time to
accomplish with that much paperwork! The government probably didn't
expect this program to be the success it was! This is one of the
stimulus programs that they should have kept! It kept car dealers and
their employees going, it sold product, even if it was mostly foreign
makes(hey, the employees live here and have to eat). It is funny: most
car dealers are big time Republicans, and it is the Republicans in
Congress who bitched about the program! If more stimulus had actually
gone to manufacturing jobs like this one, maybe we would be on the road
to recovery. Hell, every government in Europe/Asia subsidizes their
auto industry to some extent. In Canada, the program really helped the
Dodge Grand Caravan, the Windsor, Ontario plant kept three shifts going!

 

I'd say because Chrysler and GM don't have fuel efficient vehicles many
desire. They weren't selling so they slowed production, then stopped
completely during their reorganization.
Last year I looked at their product and saw nothing I wanted.
Early this year both companies were almost giving away some car models,
unfortunately still nothing I desired. Nothing had changed, same
designs.

Chrysler knows that, the Sebring and Caliper aren't selling very well.
Chrysler ads don't even mention them anymore, it's all about trucks.

 

Actually they cut back a shift, then had to shut down during the
reorganization due to parts shortages. Vans became very difficult to
get.
Now they are back to 3 shifts and own the mni van market again.
The only Chrysler van not selling well is the bunch (20,000 I hear) that
Chrysler built for VW.

 

I agree. I'm not saying it's a failure, only that it's taking a long
time to process the paperwork. It was expected that this program
would be $1B and run for several months, they tripled it to $3B and it
only took about a month to use it up. So the workload effectively
went up by a factor of around 10x.

 

Owns? The Odyssey outsells both the Caravan and T & C (although their
combined sales top the Odyssey). Further, Honda has far fewer fleet
sales than Chrysler.

Well, no VWs sell all that well in the US these days.

 

Here in Canada the VW new 2.0L diesel sells very well.
It's fuel mileage is similar to the Prius in Real World measurements.

In the previous several years the Golf has sold very well.


VW is building a new plant in the USA, so there must be a good demand
for VW products.

 

So, they do indeed own that market (which they created in the first
place). Its silly to separate the Caravan and T&C just to give honduh a
"win." But honduh is following Chrysler's lead from 15 years ago- today
its honduh minivans that can't keep a transmission together for more
than 50k miles it seems.

 

But that's why Ford wins the "pickup sales race" some years -- GM's
sales are split between Chevy and GMC. If the maker chooses to split
the models, they can hardly complain about the sales being split. It
happens -- Ford Taurus and Mercury Sable sales were never lumped
together, for example.

Not according to what the owners report to Consumer Reports -- I
suggest you check which make has lots of red circles and which lots of
black ones.

 

GM can't complain when Ford does it in their advertising. But if
somebody in a GM group were to claim Ford trucks outsell GM because they
outsell GMC, I'd hope someone would correct it.

I hadn't heard abut Honda's transmissions before, but CR is a completely
non-credible source.

 

Yeah, I mean who cares what the actual owners, thousands of them,
say? What a person here claims another person said is so much more
reliable.

 

Who cares what a self-selected sample, in violation of every principle
of polling, says? Not me. A person I've known on-line for years (and
met a couple of times in person) as a very reliable source of
information is so much more, well, reliable.

 

Yeah, who says the evaluations of thousands is more reliable than that
of one?

(You obviously know nothing about polling.)

 

Dude, it's common knowledge that CR is biased towards imports. Do
you even know what self-selecting is all about? Let me illustrate here.

A ragazine I'll call Crap Reports or CR for short, has a circulation of 100.

All of that 100 people get eval surveys.

20% of the 100 people buy imports. 50% of the people who buy
imports have problems with them and are dissatisfied with the factory
resolution, and so are highly motivated to complain. That's 10 people
if you can't do the math. The other half of the import buyers are
generally satisfied and so aren't motivated to complain or praise.

80% of the 100 people buy domestics. 20% of them have problems
and are highly motivated to complain. That's 16 people if you can't
do the math. The other 64 people are generally satisfied and so aren't
motivated to complain or praise.

The surveys go out. The dissatisfied people in both the import and
domestic groups get the survey and think "Ha, this is my chance to
stick it to that jerkoff car company" So, all of them sit down and put
black marks over the entire survey about their vehicle.

The satisfied people aren't much motivated to spend a lot of time responding
to a dumb survey, so only 2% of them respond.

CR gets the surveys back. The domestics return 16 surveys full of vitrol,
and 12 surveys that are generally satisfied. The imports return 10 surveys
that are full of vitrol and 2 surveys that are generally satisfied.

CR then calculates the results as follows:

28 domestic owners responded
12 import owners responded
60 non-respondents

CR assumes the market is split 50-50 between imports and domestics,
(since it's obviously rediculous that everyone doesn't have a car) so
there must be 50 imports and 50 domestics out there. Since it's also
well known that happy people mostly aren't going to waste time responding,
the response rate on happy people is low, so they toss those responses
completely.

So they arrive at the following assumptions:

32% of domestic owners have problems with their cars (16/50)

20% of import owners have problems with their cars (20/50)

Therefore, Imports win.

In reality, although 75% of domestic owners are satisfied, only 50%
of the Import owners are satisfied.

REAL polls handle this skewing by several mechanisms:

1) They remove the influence of the self-selection. Think about it. People
that buy Crap Reports are likely to be poorer. Rich people with plenty
of money don't care about getting the "best deal" they just buy what they
want and sell it before the warranty runs out. And since they are buying
the most expensive cars, if they have a problem the dealership rolls out
the red carpet on a warranty service to the point that they will drive a
vehicle to the rich guy's house and tow off his new car that won't start.
(or whatever) You get that when you walk into a dealership and drop a
personal check for $60K down on a car. You don't get that when you
walk in and finance a $10K car and expect to get $500 off on your worn
out trade-in. Thus rich people aren't wasting time with CR and aren't
answering surveys. Thus, the CR surveys are going to be heavily weighted
with cheaper car models. A real polling org calls a demographic so
that they get a response from across the spectrum.

2) The apply statistical normalizing. To put it simply, it's impossible to
know on a self-selected survey what the actual penetration of a car
model is into the survey group. You would have to call everyone in
the CR subscriber group and ask them what kind of car they had,
and even then the results would only be accurate for the CR demographic,
which isn't applicable to the general public.

3) They use opposite questions to see if the subject is paying attention.
For
example a typical CR survey asks "On a scale of 1 to 10 how satisfied
are you with your car" then continues on. A real survey would ask this
same question, then about 20 questions later would ask "on a scale of
1 to 10, how dissatisfied are you with your car" If the subject is paying
attention then he would put a 2 on the second question if he had put an
8 on the first question. If the subject was just trying to rush through the
survey to get the "prize" for completing the survey, then the answers for
the 2 questions would likely both be an 8 but certainly would not mirror
each other. A real survey would toss that respondent.

Anyway, the Crap Reports ragazine doesn't do any of that which is why
their survey results are rubbish. In fact, you can apply several
reasonably-
sounding analysises to the above raw numbers and get completely opposite
and self-contradictory results.

Ted

 

<snip>

Wow -- very nice discussion. I just figured he wasn't worth responding
to again.

Incidentally, while the problems are claimed to be fixed now, it turns
out Honda transmissions earlier this decade were so bad there was a
class-action lawsuit and settlement.