Fiat Chrysler beats Ford in March sales
Jeep powers 14% surge amid boom in SUV sales.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles sold more vehicles to regular U.S. consumers than Ford last month, a rare victory that shows the strength of America’s SUV boom.
Soaring deliveries of Jeep sport utility vehicles — including a more than sixfold jump for the redesigned Compass model — carried Fiat Chrysler to a 14 percent surge in total March sales.
The automaker beat estimates and topped crosstown rival Ford when excluding shipments to rental-car companies and other fleet customers.
The sales results are the latest indication that the explosion in SUV demand the last few years is here to stay.
Ford Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett is taking a page out of the playbook of Fiat Chrysler’s Sergio Marchionne by cutting some cars from the lineup and retooling factories to build more of the crossovers, off-roaders and big rigs that American consumers crave.
“Marchionne looks like the smartest guy in the industry right now,” Maryann Keller, a longtime auto industry analyst and consultant in Stamford, Conn., said. “Why beat yourself over the head selling cars no one wants?”
Ford, General Motors and Honda also reported bigger-than-expected bumps in March sales, sending U.S. automakers’ stocks higher. Shares rose as much as 9.4 percent for Fiat Chrysler, 4.4 percent for GM and 2.7 percent for Ford as of 11:10 a.m. in New York.
“It was a blockbuster month and beyond what was anticipated,” said Michelle Krebs, a senior analyst with Autotrader. “This could blow past the forecast. There were some incentives, but tax refunds are coming in and the economy is good.”
GM’s deliveries surged 16 percent in March, triple the percentage gain analysts had been expecting.
The company is throwing a wrench in the industry sales reporting process by announcing a plan to end a 25-year-long practice of disclosing monthly results and shifting to quarterly releases.
The move will better separate “real” demand trends from “short-term fluctuations,” said Kurt McNeil, U.S. vice president of sales operations.
Ford’s light-vehicle sales rose 3.5 percent, as record March deliveries of the company’s SUVs helped to outpace the 0.8 percent gain analysts had been forecasting. The company will be better off after replacing the Escape crossover and Explorer SUV with redesigned versions soon, Mark LaNeve, Ford’s U.S. sales chief, said.
“There have been months on occasion where FCA outsells us on a retail basis — in any given month a lot of different things can happen,” LaNeve said. “We’re not going to blow our brains out on incentives on these products at the end of their life cycle and damage the brand health.”
Hackett, 62, is planning to shrink Ford’s passenger-car lineup. The only sedans and coupes that will survive will be low-volume, higher-priced models that’ll help toward the company’s goal to boost profit margins.
Marchionne, 65, has already killed off the Dodge Dart and Chrysler 200 to reorient Fiat Chrysler around Jeep SUVs and Ram pickups.
The company’s blowout sales in March snapped an 18-month streak of total U.S. deliveries declines, in part due to the challenge of converting car factories over to manufacturing Jeeps and Rams instead.