After a weak previous year marked by supply chain problems and material shortages, the US auto market got off to a better start in the first quarter of 2023. At the market leader General Motors (GM), sales in the three months to the end of March rose by 18 percent year-on-year to around 603,200 new vehicles, as the group announced on Monday in Detroit. According to GM, it has delivered more than 20,000 electric cars.
Volkswagen also benefited from the car boom in the USA and, according to its own statement, sold 67,853 vehicles with the VW logo in the first quarter – around 4.4 percent more than a year ago. Urban SUVs such as the Atlas SUV model, which is very popular with US customers, accounted for 90 percent of sales. The luxury class manufacturer Audi, which belongs to the VW Group, even increased sales by 49 percent to 52,763 cars. For electric cars, the increase was 37 percent.
Audi’s rival BMW also increased sales in the US in the first quarter. The company announced at its US headquarters in Woodcliff Lake that 82,466 BMW vehicles had been sold. That was 11.9 percent more than in the same period last year. Deliveries of the subsidiary brand Mini increased by 5.9 percent to 7284 cars.
While Hyundai, Nissan and Honda also posted significant gains, industry giant Toyota continued to struggle. Here, US sales fell by 9.1 percent to 176,456 vehicles. The figures from other car manufacturers such as Mercedes-Benz, Porsche and the second largest US manufacturer Ford were not yet available. Intractable supply chain issues and shortages of key components like computer chips had left the US market in 2022 with its worst sales performance in over a decade.
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