Honda to (Finally) Outsell Chrysler in 2009

In one of my recent columns, I expressed some concern about the age of the Honda lineup, noting that key vehicles — like the Honda Civic and Honda Accord — were getting a bit long in the tooth.

Well, as certain Krome on Cars readers have pointed out, both those vehicles remained among the top 10 bestsellers for November, and were actually joined by another stablemate, the Honda CR-V. In fact, the combined sales numbers for this trio came out to 44,846 units in November; Honda earned more sales from these three products alone than automakers like Hyundai, Volkswagen, BMW and Subaru did with their entire portfolios.

Boosted by these numbers, Honda has also locked in its position as the the fourth-best-selling OEM in the U.S. for 2009, as it leads Chrysler by 198,000+ sales going into December.

In other words, as "old" as some of those Hondas may be, it certainly hasn't affected their popularity much.

But let's take a quick look at another side of this story. Based on their own press materials, Honda and Acura together offered 14 or so models during November and tallied a total of 74,003 sales. When you run the math, the result is that Honda's top three accounted for a bit more than 60 percent of its combined November sales.

For comparison's sake, the top three models at Ford (Ford F-150, Ford Escape and Ford Fusion) accounted for about 48.2 percent of all Blue Oval sales (including Volvo) and the three best sellers for Toyota (Toyota Camry, Toyota Corolla and Toyota RAV-4) represented about 45.5 percent of total sales (including Scion and Lexus).

For the rest of the big players, the results were as follows: The Chevrolet Impala, Chevrolet Malibu and Chevrolet Silverado were GM's top three for November, representing just 30.1 percent of total sales and 32.6 percent of total core brand sales. At Nissan, the three November sales leaders — Nissan Sentra, Nissan Versa and Nissan Altima — accounted for 46 percent of company sales (including those of Infiniti). Overall Chrysler sales were lead by the Dodge Ram, Dodge Caravan and Chrysler Town & Country, and represented some 39.6 percent of sales.

Let's toss Hyundai and Kia into the mix, too. Combining sales of both — remember, Hyundai and Kia are owned by the same company — one sees the Hyundai Sonata, Hyundai Elantra and Hyundai Santa Fe at the top of the list, making up about 45.3 percent of November sales. (This includes the "-2" Hyundai Entourage minivans "sold" in November.)

So, among the best-selling OEMs in November, Honda relied on its top three products to a much more significant extent than the competition. The question is, is it too much?

Consider this: Chrysler outsold the Japanese company by about 500,000 units in 2007 and still maintained an approximately 20,000-sales lead in 2008. From this perspective, the big news might not be Honda passing Chrysler, it might be the fact that it took so long to happen.

Really, the main reason things changed this year wasn't so much because of what went right for Honda, it was because of what went wrong — everything — for Chrysler.

I take that back: It's not that everything went wrong for Chrysler, it's that nothing much actually happened at all, at least product-wise. And it still won't, at least for a while. Chrysler dealers won't be seeing any significant new products in the crossover or small-car segments for years yet, and this is where the sales action is going to be for the foreseeable future.

True, the Dodge Journey has been a modest hit for the company, with sales up 93 percent in November and 10 percent year-to-date, and that's good. But I had thought an updated Dodge Caliber would help, too — instead, sales of the vehicle dropped 85 percent in November, falling from 2,755 last year to just 412, and that's bad.

With numbers like this, and news that production is again being halted at its plants — for an extended "holiday break" — it certainly won't shock anybody if both Nissan and Hyundai-Kia pass Chrysler in the sales race next year. And while it might surprise some people if they pass Honda, too, I won't be among them.