October Auto Sales: The Winners

Okay, before I let the air out of the happiness balloon, let's give credit where credit is due. At the top of the heap for October auto sales, still, were Hyundai, Kia and Subaru, which were up 49, 45 and 41 percent, respectively. For the Koreans, the story continues to be how the world's fourth largest automaker is bringing its full resources to bear on the U.S. market, unleashing a steady stream of improved products. The Hyundai Elantra, for one, saw a 300+ percent increase year-over-year, and the Hyundai Accent, Hyundai Santa Fe, Kia Rio and Kia Borrego all saw boosts measured in the thousands of vehicles. Plus, both the Kia Soul and Kia Forte, wholly new models, continue to gain traction with customers.

At Subaru, the country's ongoing move into smaller — yet still SUV-ish — vehicles is bearing dividends, with the Subaru Outback up a whopping 175 percent and the Subaru Forester notching a sales gain of 13 percent. The company also has to be happy that the Subaru Legacy was up 112 percent, indicating buyers are starting to expand their interest in the Subaru lineup beyond SUVs — although it must be noted that sales of the smaller Subaru Impreza were down 22 percent.

Also worth noting is that a number of high-end brands also saw significant sales jumps. Disappointing results have dogged the luxury segment — usually resistant to economic downturns — for months, but Cadillac, Mercedes-Benz, Lexus and Porsche all saw at least double-digit sales bumps, as did near-lux brands such as Buick and Volvo.

And speaking of GM core brands, sales figures for Chevrolet and GMC were also on the positive side of the ledger. In fact, the General's scorecard for its fantastic foursome looked like this: Cadillac, up 21.6 percent; GMC, up 20.4 percent; Buick, up 18.5 percent; Chevrolet, up 8.5 percent. For GM's dead brands, the story was decidedly different, with all four divisions seeing drops of at least 18.4 percent, "led" by HUMMER's 77.6 percent fall-off.

That puts a rosy spin on GM's future, but doing ye olde deep dive reveals the increases were built on a 24.4 percent sales boost for core-brand trucks — core-brand car sales were actually off 6.7 percent. Cherry-picking some numbers here, the new Buick LaCrosse continues to impress, seeing a 100+ percent sales jump, and the Chevrolet Malibu remained strong in the highly competitive mid-size segment, with sales rising 11.1 percent. GM is also benefiting from its new crossover lineup, where the new Cadillac SRX notched a healthy 279.6 percent increase, the Chevrolet Equinox improved sales by 176.9 percent, and the larger Chevrolet Traverse sold nearly 10,000 units.

But, again, to get back to the body-on-frame trucks, sales of the Chevrolet Tahoe, Chevrolet Suburban, GMC Sierra, GMC Yukon and GMC Yukon XL were all in the black, with the Tahoe reaching a 110.6 percent improvement. I suppose that's better than the alternative of across-the-board sales drops, but GM is not going to be able to build its future on the sales of full-size trucks.

Compared to GM, Ford — despite an overall sales increase of a bit over 3 percent — must be a bit disappointed in its October results. The Ford brand itself is looking healthy, with cars and crossovers up 18.5 percent and 19.2 percent, respectively. All cars were up except the Ford Focus, which is nearing the end of its life-cycle and still sold more than 10,000 units, and all crossovers saw positive results except for the Ford Taurus X, which is not in production anymore.

But the Blue Oval was dragged down a bit by Lincoln, where sales were off 9 percent. (Mercury was essentially flat, with the numbers down 1.1 percent.) Ford's new MKS sedan found 22.3 percent fewer buyers as compared to October 2008, and the Lincoln MKT, the division's new large lux crossover, sold a mere 619 units.

The problem in Dearborn is that, despite the success of the Ford division per se, Lincoln and Mercury are still relying on lineups that are too heavily weighted with obviously badge-engineered products. Really, this includes every vehicle except for the MKS and MKT. The former is a good start, but represents just the first few steps on what will be a long, long road to returning Lincoln to its past glory. The MKT, despite all its bells and whistles, remain a very large crossover in an industry that's going small.

Nissan — the division, not the overall company, which includes Lexus — and Volkswagen round out the list of companies with October sales increases. The German company saw sales up 7.2 percent, which translates into an increase of 1,148 units. The new Volkswagen CC is a definite hit, and the Volkswagen Jetta lineup (including the sedan, diesel and sport wagon) was up a healthy 25 percent. Significantly for the automaker, diesels accounted for more than 40 percent of Jetta sales and more than 19 percent of all VW Golf sales.

The situation at Nissan somewhat mirrors that at GM, where a 7.7 percent sales increase was built primarily on a 17.5 percent increase in trucks, including a 97.2 percent jump in Nissan Armada purchases and a 67.6 percent leap for the full-size Nissan Titan pickup.

And those number are a fitting finish to today's column, because, despite all these good results, the underlying situation is that overall industry sales stayed essentially flat in October as compared to the same month last year: In fact, the market as a whole was down about 100 units year-over-year.

Check in tomorrow to find out why.