By the Numbers - February 2011: Fish In A Barrel Edition

Fusion Outsells Accord, Toyota Looks Good, GM Jumps

First, a couple items of house keeping. For starters, we've decided to stop including Saturn, Pontiac and Hummer. The brands haven't sold a thing for months now, so it's safe to mark their times of death and move on only reporting sales for the remaining four brands at General Motors. We would also advise Ford to stop reporting Mercury sales, as there are none and the weight of what the dead brand sold last year is dragging down the automaker's overall performance.

With that out of the way, feast your eyes on the sales figures for February 2011, an impressive 24 days of selling if ever there were some. In fact, it was the best month of sales for the U.S. auto industry since the Cash for Clunkers program in August 2009. What sticks out most is Saab posting a 463% increase in sales versus the same month last year, which isn't that hard to do considering it only sold 97 units last year.

What's also evident is that Toyota appeared to have a great month, which isn't surprising considering that February of 2010 was the company's first full month of U.S. sales after recalls surrounding instances of sudden acceleration really gained national attention. So expect Toyota's sales performance over the next few months or more to appear a little inflated.

Finally, we'll point out one more thing that's not evident at all in the table below. Ford reported 23,111 sales of the Fusion last month, a number that stuck out to as particularly high for that model. We checked, and it is. Thanks to particularly attractive incentive deals (and maybe extra fleet sales we can't see, it's impossible to tell), the Fusion outsold the Nissan Altima and Honda Accord in February to become the month's second best-selling car behind the Toyota Camry.

Check out the rest of the moth's numbers in the table below.


*Brands and companies are displayed in descending order according to their percentage change in volume sales. There were 24 selling days in February 2011 versus 24 selling days in February 2010, so the change in monthly sales volume will be the same as the change in average daily sales rate (DSR) for each brand/company. Also, brands are combined and reported as companies only if their sales figures are released jointly.

UPDATE: Chrysler Group added