Our friends over at Green Car Congress have the final stats on hybrid sales in 2006, and they’re pretty strong. According to their numbers, 251,803 hybrids were sold in the U.S. last year, up 22 percent from 2005 (and I’m happy to say that Green Car Congress does not include the Green Line Vue in these stats, so the numbers are pretty “pure”). What’s interesting to me is how the numbers counter the “bloom is off the rose” arguments about slipping hybrid sales.
The overall car and light truck market went down by 2.6 percent this past year. Growth in a declining market seems to show some strength right there. Monthly hybrid sales in 2006 were higher than in the corresponding month in 2005, every month of the year. So we’re talking about sustained overall growth. Also, hybrid sales in ‘05 took a similar three month tip from September-November as they did last year, and then, just like this year, rebounded with a strong December.
The introduction of the Camry Hybrid certainly helped overall sales strength (the rather lackluster sales of the muscular Accord Hybrid in comparison is hopefully a lesson all automakers will take into account). Among the big winners were the Highlander Hybrid with a sales boost of 75 percent, and both the Escape and Civic Hybrid saw strong 20 percent growth over 2005.
Our research director David Friedman points out that, “25 percent continuous growth in sales would put hybrids at nearly 90 percent of sales by 2025 – I would take that. There’s no reason to expect the growth rates we saw in ’05, when the market nearly doubled as it was still in its relative infancy.”
Posted by: ScottN
After reading this blog posting, I read at http://www.calstart.org/info/newsnotes/nn_detail.php?id=8859 that California has run out of even the extended supply (75,000 boosted on January 1st to 85,000) of solo carpool-lane access stickers for qualifying hybrids (those with comparatively high fuel economy and low emissions ratings). I have argued, here and elsewhere ( http://www.altfuels.org/misc/callegis.html#hybrid ), that it was a mistake for California to offer this perk to hybrids, mainly since they were already selling very well without it; moreover, most hybrids that were _already_ on the road were offered stickers, and there were already so many of them out there that a large fraction of the stickers likely went to this preexisting population. (Does anybody at UCS have numbers for what fraction of stickers went on cars actually sold or leased after the program began?)
So, if many stickers went on hybrids that had already been sold, and the rest went on hybrids that would (given the length of waiting lists) have sold anyway even without the stickers, then the existence of the solo carpool-lane access stickers didn't result in any additional hybrids on the road. So just what exactly did we accomplish by handing out these stickers, except clogging carpool lanes and muddying the waters with regard to the natural-gas and (if automakers actually made any available...) electric vehicles that really do benefit from the incentive?
Posted by: altfuels | February 06, 2007 at 08:28 PM
View the new enthusiasts site:
http://www.gm-volt.com
Posted by: lj | February 09, 2007 at 09:26 PM