If you were wondering how your favourite automobile brand fared in the USA during February – at least as compared with February of last year – wonder no more.  It is more than likely that they (Acura, Buick, Chrysler, Ford, Hyundai, Nissan, Porsche, Subaru etc.) sucked.  Royally. Â
Thank the tumbling housing market, nation-wide economic concern, and rising gas prices. Â Although earlier this week we heard rumours of that the major Japanese makes would escape February unscathed. Not so much. Nissan and Toyota suffered sales drops of 3.2% and 6.3%, respectively.
Rather than explain everybody’s bad news, GoodCarBadCar chooses to be positive. Â Yeah, right. Whatever.Â
Mini sales jumped 38.5%, but you can assume that additional models account for much of that growth. Honda growth did occur, but just 1.9%. Â Mazda’s + was 2.5% and Mercedes-Benz saw 3% higher sales than February of 2007. Â
As Autoblog put it, the leap year simply “offered most automakers an extra day to suck”, although the percentages you see relate to average daily selling rates.