Most of you probably already saw this while I was sleeping, but out of tradition and for the benefit of those who haven’t, here’s the July sales report for US Saab sales.
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Saab 9-3: There were 421 units of the Saab 9-3 sold in July 2009. This is down 69.8% from the 1,394 vehicles sold in the same month in 2008.
Saab 9-5: There were 62 units of the Saab 9-5 sold in July 2009. This is down 72.7% from the 227 vehicles sold in the same month in 2008.
Saab 9-7x: There were 91 units of the Saab 9-7x sold in July 2009. This is down 77.5% from the 405 vehicles sold in the same month in 2008.
Total Saab sales: Total Saab sales in the US were just 574 vehicles, a fall of 71% from the 2,026 sales recorded in July last year.
Total year-to-date sales are 5,960 vehicles, which is down almost 58% from the 14,094 sold from Jan-July last year. There appears to be a very real chance that Saab’s US sales will not reach 10,000 vehicles this year.
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Again, as with the Swedish market, Saab are coming to a point of almost total irrelevance in the US due to lack of exposure and uncertainty about the brand’s fate.
The bigget killer is the lack of a proper leasing program and it’s more than a little ironic that GM’s marketing maven, Mark LaNeve, announced a new national leasing program for selected higher-end GM vehicles today. One of those vehicles will be the Saab 9-4x’s sister vehicle, the new Cadillac SRX.
In the next day or so, I’ll be publishing an open letter from a US-based Saab dealer, looking at the myriad issues they’re facing, and what they need to survive and grow in the future.
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