May 2011 Auto Sales

AMERICAN HONDA -23%
The Japanese disaster hit Honda almost as hard as Toyota. As a result, Honda got passed by Chrysler and the Koreans, and both the Civic and the Accord fell out of the Top Ten. Honda said it will be back up to full production capacity for all models by August. Honda -22%
The Accord (-40%) and the new Civic (-36%) suffered in May, as did the CR-V (-9%), although all were coming off very good year-prior totals. It wasn’t all bad news for Honda, though, as the Fit (+35%), at least, managed to post a gain. Acura -24%
All Acura models were in negative territory. The MDX (-6%) was the strongest, while the weakest models were -- that’s right -- the RL (-62%) and the ZDX (-58%). NISSAN NORTH AMERICA -9%
Nissan -8%
Nissan’s decline was mitigated by the Altima’s strong performance (+16%), as it muscled into fourth place among all nameplates. The Frontier (+25%) also was in positive territory and the Juke and the Leaf added a few thousand units. Leaf deliveries doubled versus April. Otherwise, it was mostly all downhill for the rest of the lineup, particularly the Versa (-51%) and the Titan (-44%). Infiniti -21%
With all of its cars made in Japan, Infiniti was more greatly affected by the trouble there than was Nissan. All models were down except for the mighty QX (+11%).