U.S. Vehicle Sales Dip 1.5% in Late January

Sales of North American-made cars dropped 6.6% in late January, but strong sales of light trucks meant that the overall vehicle sales rate was down only 1.5%, auto makers reported Monday.

Domestic truck sales during the Jan. 21-31 period rose 8.1%, spurred by strong sales at Chrysler Corp., which offered incentives on its popular minivans.

Chrysler said its late-January truck sales rose 42.7% from the same time last year. For all of January, Chrysler’s truck sales were up 39.7% from January, 1989.

Industry sales results in the year-earlier period were inflated somewhat by heavy fleet sales, a condition analysts said made this year’s late January figures look relatively encouraging.

Typically, a large percentage of January and February car sales go to fleets, including auto rental companies and large corporations. But this year, because of severe cuts in production last month, fleet deliveries were put off.

“January a year ago was an especially strong fleet sales month for Ford,” said Robert Rewey, vice president for Ford Motor Co.’s North American Automotive Operations. “Due to downtime at a number of our plants in the early part of this January, assembly and shipment of many fleet units was delayed.”

Given the lack of fleet sales, said analyst Charles Brady of Oppenheimer & Co. of New York, the car sales rate fell far less than might be expected.

While car sales in January were weaker than a year earlier, truck sales have maintained their strength, mainly because of Chrysler’s incentives on minivans, which expired at the end of last month. The incentives for other vehicles were continued through February.

VEHICLE SALES

Jan. 21-31, 1990 % change GM* 152,464 -6.5 Ford* 104,599 -14.2 Chrysler* 71,773 +20.3 Honda U.S. 19,469 +65.0 Mazda U.S. 2,634 +62.5 Mitsubishi U.S. 2,884 +548.1 Nissan*U.S. 5,718 -40.4 Toyota U.S. 11,347 +31.7 TOTAL 376,628 -1.5

*Includes light truck sales.

There were 9 selling days in the selling period this year and last year.