New York
CNN
—
One year after losing the title it held for nearly a century as the top car seller in America, General Motors is back on top.
GM
(GM) reported Wednesday US sales of 2.3 million vehicles. Strong fourth quarter sales, up 41% from a year ago, allowed it to end the year with sales up nearly 3% from the 2.2 million US vehicles it sold in 2021, when it suffered a 13% decline.
Meanwhile Toyota
(TM), which had captured the top sales spot in 2021, had its full-year sales fall nearly 10% to 2.1 million, despite posting a 13% increase in fourth quarter sales.
In each of the last two years, industry-wide auto sales were limited by a shortage of parts, primarily computer chips, needed to build the cars and trucks consumers wanted. Total US new vehicle sales are expected to be down to just less than 14 million vehicles when the final sales results are reported across the industry later this week.
That would be the lowest sales total since the country was just climbing out of the Great Recession more than a decade go. Sales bottomed out at 10.5 million in 2009, the year GM and Chrysler declared bankruptcy and received federal bailouts, and had only climbed back to 12.7 million by 2011, the last year the industry sales fell below 14 million.
Sales had been 17 million in 2019, the year before the pandemic upended both the economy and supply chains.
– This is a developing story
