North American Passenger Car Sales for 2021
Total 2021 full-year sales of 15,079,182 units were up 3.4% from 2020 year-end totals. Truck and SUV full-year sales were up 5.3% to 11,654,294 units, while passenger car sales were down 2.6% to 3,424,888 units for 2021.
After a great first half of 2021 which showed a 28.8% gain on the same period the year before, the US car market has recovered only slightly from its dip in sales of 2020. Supply shortages due to reduced semiconductor availability caused the market to drop by nearly 22% in Q4, which translates to nearly 900,000 lost deliveries. As a result, the full-year figure is up only 3% to just over 15 million deliveries, still well below the average of 17.2 million the US car market showed between 2014 and 2019. Still, most manufacturers and especially dealers won’t be complaining about their bottom line in 2021 as manufacturers focused their limited production capacity on higher margin models while for dealers the shortages in supply reduced inventory and pushed up transaction prices.
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