Quote:
Originally Posted by bentheswift
Honda is selling about half as many Insights as they had expected to... based on how well the prius has sold. Honda likely to miss U.S. sales targets for Insight?
There is already a waiting list for the new Prius. If I remember correctly, Prius sales increased EVERY year from 43,000 cars in 2003 to 281,000 cars in 2007.
I think it's more because the Insight is a half-ass hybrid and looks so blatantly like the 2nd gen Prius that people don't want it. |
they sold about 10k Prius in May, so I doubt that is an increase from 2007 numbers you quote (actually 42k for first 5 months of this year, versus 79k for same period last year, likely in part due to anticipation of the new model).
Honda Insight sales are predicted to fall short by about 1/3 (in part due to gas prices as already mentioned), so even if they were 1/3 higher for May they still would have been outsold by the Camaro.
More importantly what I realized working to work this morning passing one NYC traffic Prius after another and a car rental with two Camaros parked out front is a large number of those Camaro sales were probably to Hertz,Avis, etc, and a huge number of Prius sales are to fleets...it was the same thing with the Accord/Camry sales battles - Camry would often come out on top, but if you subtracted the fleet sales, Accord was way ahead....Fortunately Honda has stayed away from rental/fleet sales for the most part and hopefully will continue to do so....
Dont get me wrong - I like the styling of the Camaro, and would even consider the convertible if/when it arrives...I grew up driving GM cars as my father was a GM dealer for many years...I just think that these early sales numbers may not be indicative of a long term trend....