General Motors said on Monday that new US vehicle sales across the industry in December are on pace to match November’s results, Reuters reported.
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“It feels a heck of a lot like November at this point,” Paul Ballew, GM’s head of industry analysis, told Reuters at a briefing, adding that forecasting sales for December, however, are difficult to do because many car and truck sales are conducted in the last week of the month.
Reuters noted that, last month, US light vehicle sales hit a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 16.8 million units, above the average rate of just over 16.5 million so far this year.
Ballew reportedly said that the strengthening US economy will help boost light vehicle sales next year to an annual rate of about 16.9 million cars and trucks, but the industry won’t grow its way out of its troubles, including high incentive costs.
“Pricing is going to be difficult in this industry, it doesn’t mean that it’s something that’s going lead us in the road to perdition,” Ballew told Reuters.
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By GlobalDataBallew reportedly said that US new vehicle sales are growing at an average rate of 200,000 a year, and light vehicle sales will surpass the record 17.4 million hit in 2000 by 2006 or 2007.
“We believe we’ll be close to 19 million (total) units by the end of the decade,” Ballew told Reuters, including annual sales of about 300,000 to 400,000 medium- and heavy-duty trucks in his estimate.
