Apr 3, 2009 -
Number Crunching
Have you wondered how hybrid vehicle sales are doing during these interesting days?
John O'Dell has taken a look at those numbers on Green Car Advisor and at first blush it appears that hybrid sales have fallen off more than the average.
It's no secret, hybrids haven't been doing well lately, on dealers' lots, in the media, or in a lot of political arguments. Sales data that comes in on a monthly basis shows hybrid sales sinking faster than auto sales as a whole. And there's nothing pretty about auto sales as a whole.
Indeed, looking at March's tally shows that the 21,433 hybrid cars and trucks sold in the U.S. last month represents a 43.9 percent drop from hybrid sales in March of 2008 while sales of all other types of new passenger vehicles, on a March-vs-March basis, were off "just" 36.5 percent.
I would attribute the "hybrid hit" to the simple fact that hybrids generally are higher priced than non-hybrid models and the sales of anything higher priced are suffering right now as people are being careful about what they spend. But you can draw your own conclusions and take a closer look at the sales numbers at the Green Car Advisor
