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US car sales plummet in June
WASHINGTON: Carmakers hit more bumps in the road
in June as US sales fell precipitously, and manufacturers failed to
adapt to a shift in demand to more fuel-efficient cars, company
reports showed on July 1. Overall sales totaled 1.189 million
vehicles or a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 13.64 million, down
13 percent year-to-year, according to market research firm Autodata.
“The $4-per-gallon gasoline, the recession in
housing and a collapse in consumer confidence has kept people
sitting on their hands,” said David Healy, analyst at Burnham
Securities.
In the current environment of soaring fuel
prices and weak consumer confidence, Healy said, “it’ll probably
be 2010 before any of the Detroit companies will be profitable
again.”
General Motors, the largest carmaker, said its
US sales fell 18.5 percent in June to 265,937, holding off a
challenge from Toyota in the domestic market. Adjusted for selling
days, the decline was 8.3 percent, GM said.
Chrysler showed the worst declines among the top
carmakers, reporting a 36-percent slide in US sales from a year ago
to 117,457. Ford Motor Co. said its US sales tumbled 28.1 percent to
167,090 units with SUV sales skidding over 50 percent.
-- AFP
Brazil to surpass Germany in VW sales
FRANKFURT: Volkswagen, the biggest European
carmaker, will sell more vehicles in Brazil than in its home market
of Germany this year, the head of VW Brazil told a newspaper on July
4. Brazil will thus become the group’s second-biggest market,
after China, while Germany will slip to number three, Thomas Schmall
told financial daily Boersen-Zeitung.
The report also quoted VW technical director
Ulrich Hackenberg as saying, “After China, South America is the
great growth market and we are well positioned there because we have
been producing for a long time in Brazil and we design models
specifically for the South American market.”
-- AFP
Hydrogen cars not a hit until 2020
MADRID: Hydrogen-powered cars will not be
commercially available on a large scale before 2020, a senior
official from Japanese said maker Mazda said on June 30 in Spain at
an international oil conference.
“The earliest that customers will use these
environmentally-friendly vehicles in a normal way will be 2020,”
the general manager of the company’s technical research center,
Tsutomu Matsuoka, said at the World Petroleum Congress in Madrid,
one of the oil industry’s biggest events.
-- AFP
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