New car sales

With gas prices high, you'd expect people to buckle down and hang onto their existing cars rather than spending the money to buy new ones, right? Errrrrrr, actually not. According to Mike Jackson, the outspoken and always quotable CEO of AutoNation, buyers who've put off their new-car purchases are...

Yesterday, we told you electric-car sales were down slightly in April--even as overall car sales continued to recover. But while the plug-in sales will likely stay low for awhile, both ebbing and flowing, one green model benefited greatly in April: the ur-hybrid Toyota Prius. Now that all four...

Sales of plug-in electric cars fell last month, with especially low sales of the Nissan Leaf, following their strong showing in March. Last month, just 370 Nissan Leaf battery-electric cars were sold, down from 579 in March, and bringing this year's Leaf sales to only 2,103 in the first four...

It's working. Concerted efforts by automakers to meet new, more stringent fuel-economy requirements are gradually driving up the efficiency of new passenger vehicles sold in the U.S. A report from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute pegged the average gas mileage of new...

It's the kind of question that makes every CEO roll his eyes. In effect, it translated to: Your sales of one model last month were lousy, so is that car a failure in the market? But if the model is the Nissan Leaf, the first battery electric vehicle sold in volume in the U.S. (and around the...

Orders have been coming in ahead of projections for the European Opel Ampera, but sales prospects may be looking up in the U.S. too for GM's range-extended electric car.

You can add one more to the list of electric cars now on sale in the U.S., with deliveries last week of the very first 2012 Coda Sedan models last Friday in northern and southern California. In publicized events at Coda dealers in both Los Angeles and Siicon Valley (south of San Francisco), dealer...

U.S. vehicle sales soared in February, and so did sales of plug-in cars. A drop in the number of all-electric Nissan Leaf sales was more than offset by a rise in sales of the range-extended electric Chevrolet Volt. At least 1,500 plug-in cars were sold last month, with totals for the Mitsubishi 'i'...

Last year, U.S. car buyers drove home in roughly 17,000 plug-in cars, the bulk of them Nissan Leafs and Chevrolet Volts. As several more plug-in cars enter the market this year, analysts will watch sales carefully to see whether retail and fleet buyers are willing to pay the significant surcharge...

Gas mileage: It's all about hybrids, right? The 2012 Toyota Prius hatchback and Toyota Prius C models each get a combined 50-mpg rating from the EPA, the highest fuel efficiency of any non-plug-in vehicle sold in the U.S. So hybrid sales should be soaring. They're not. While Toyota has expanded the...

Sales of hybrid, plug-in hybrid and pure electric cars may have suffered over the summer thanks to dropping gas prices, economic woes and a drop in availability of cars, but last month sales of so-called ‘Advanced Drive’ cars reached an 8 month high. All in all, a little under 28,000...

It's the first of the month again, and that means: It's sales report time! Last month, Chevrolet sold 1,139 Volts and Nissan sold 672 Leafs. The November numbers bring totals for 2011, with only December left, to 8,720 Leafs delivered (plus 18 last December) and 6,142 Volts (plus 326 last...

If you thought the Nissan Leaf was a hard sell in the expanses of North America, then you may be surprised to learn it's doing far less well in one of its natural habitats. Cities are where electric cars often make the most sense, but the fashion and luxury-conscious buyers in smog-ridden Hong Kong...

New-car sales overall weren't great in August. The economy continues to be shaky, consumer confidence is down, and Hurricane Irene kept buyers away from dealerships. But electric-car sales last month improved on July's numbers, although they were far from their spring heights due to continued...

It's been a tough couple of years for Toyota. First was the entire sudden-acceleration mess, along with multiple recalls covering almost 10 million cars. Then came the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, which devastated Toyota's intricate global network of parts and assembly plants. But with a return...

Sometime early last week, someone somewhere in the U.S. bought a hybrid car. And while we may never know exactly who that person was, the car was the 2-millionth hybrid-electric vehicle sold here since the very first Honda Insight went on sale in late 1999. Industry trade journal Ward's Auto...

It happens every time. Gas prices go up sharply, and new car buyers suddenly decide that gas mileage is important--and shop accordingly. With gas around $4 a gallon in many parts of the country, what would you trade for higher miles per gallon? Would you pay more? Would you buy a smaller car than...

Sigh. Here we go again. It's the first of the month, which means that auto journalists are scrambling to put together their monthly sales reports. Sales in May weren't great, for a variety of reasons: higher prices and shortages of some Japanese models, among others. Unusual scrutiny But the most...

Sales of plug-in electric cars continued at a steady pace in April, with 493 Chevrolet Volts and 573 Nissan Leafs sold during the month. That brings yearly totals of the cars to 1,703 and 1,025 respectively. There were also 326 Volts and 19 Leafs sold last December, the month in which each car...

During the first quarter of 2011, small car sales accounted for 19.4 percent of all vehicles sold. That is a sudden increase in popularity--up 2.8 percent from the last quarter of 2010--and it helped propel the average fuel economy of vehicles sold in the U.S. during January, February, and March to...