
LMC’s outlook for US Light Vehicle sales in 2021 has been upgraded again, to 16.0 million units, an increase of 11% from 2020. Retail sales are projected to grow by 9% and fleet by more than 20% from 2020. Click to Enlarge.
Blame the weather since US light vehicle sales dropped to 1.18 million in February, according LMC Automotive, an automotive global forecasting consultancy. The -3% Year-over-Y decline in LMC’s view was caused by two fewer selling days this year, as well as abnormally cold weather and winter storms across many key markets. Any way you look at it, the selling-day adjusted sales volume was still down by -5.5% YoY. The annualized rate dropped to 15.7 million units, down from 16.6 mn units in January.
Compact and mid-size SUVs performed better than large pickups. They were the two most popular segments, which appears the long-term trend with mid-size SUVs gaining 0.9 percentage points of share from February 2020. Only Compact Premium SUVs grew more, up by 1.2 pp, likely from new product launches. Not surprisingly, mid-size Cars lost 2.5 pp of share from a year ago, more than any other segment. Here LMC hedges, “although consumers have been moving away from cars, lower fleet volume also hurt the segment significantly. While six segments sold more than 100,000 units last February, only four reached the threshold this year – Compact SUV, Mid-size SUV, Large Pickup and Small SUV. Combined, they accounted for 57% of total sales.” Continue reading →
Winter Storms Clobber Texas Small Businesses Unduly
The failure of an ideology that doesn’t govern for the people?
The latest data from the US Census Bureau Pulse survey* show that Texas small businesses were disproportionately hurt by the winter storms of February. The first wave of data from Phase 4 of the Small Business Pulse Survey arrived on February 25th – clearly showing the significant impact recent winter storms had on Texas.
There were, however, no questions about their impact on Cancun Ted Cruz’s taxpayer-funded vacation that was widely documented in the media. Consider that while Pulse was designed to measure changing business conditions during the coronavirus pandemic, the SBPS also captures the impact of natural disasters on small business. The picture above documents the damage Texas Governments did to their own small businesses by letting big oil have its cheaper non-regulated way. Consider Houston – roughly 4,000 energy companies, are based there. A dozen of those companies are in the Fortune 500. Carbon fuel firms are like dinosaurs – doomed. The future is green energy supported by a national strategy and a national grid. Millions of jobs are at stake. Continue reading →