August Bodes Well for Record 2015 Sales in Canada

The Canadian new light-vehicle market remains hot with a second consecutive annual record sales now a real possibility in this year.

Dealers retailed 175,191 new LVs in August at an average of 7,008 units on each of 25 selling days.

While unit volume fell just shy of the 177,447 LVs sold in 26 days in July, August’s daily rate bested that of the prior month by 2.7% and beat by 6.4% the 6,599 a day pace of August 2014, when 171,280 vehicles were delivered in 26 days.

Boding well for a new annual benchmark, with four months left to go, the 1,284,167 units sold in the first eight month this year equal 70% of the record 1,846,890 units sold in 2014.

Barring an unforeseen downturn, Canadian dealers could set a new LV all-time high of 1.89 million vehicles simply by matching the 601,000 units sold in September-December a year ago.  

The robust August performance was again due to the soaring popularity of light trucks that rose to a record of 110,805 units, a 14.1% gain over the month’s prior peak of 100,977 set a year ago.

August light-truck sales were third highest for any month this year trailing May’s 114,554 units and July’s 111,085, despite having one less selling day.

Despite a modest 0.9% bump in the daily rate, August sales of 64,386 cars trailed both July and year-ago, the latter by 4.8%.

They ranked only 10^th in the last 30 years and posed no threat to the record 91,765 units sold in August 1985, in an era when Canadian buyers favored cars over light trucks by a margin of more than three to one.

August was a bright month for General Motors LVs, sales of which rose 16.0% above those of a year earlier and 12.3% from July.

Third-place GM’s percentage gain vs. year-ago was the highest among the top five automakers, although fifth-place Honda’s 15.7% ran a strong second.

Although market-leader Fiat Chrysler saw its sales rise just 4.4% in August, that was better than No. 4 Toyota’s 2.9% gain or second-place Ford’s 1.5% shortfall.

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