The Best Selling Car In America
In May, the thrifty Honda Civic became the best-selling vehicle in America.
The Honda Civic became the best selling vehicle in America – car or truck – and both it and the Honda Accord outsold the once-invincible Ford F-150 pickup trucks.
Among the world’s automakers, Honda has long behaved as if the world is indeed running out of all kinds of resources, including oil. Its relentless focus on thrift and conservation, which seemed like eccentricities 20 or 30 years ago, today make Honda the leader of the environmental pack.
While the Detroit Three plus Toyota were getting hammered on the showroom floor in May, with sales down anywhere from 4.3% for Toyota to 27.5% for General Motors, Honda posed a stunning 15.6% sales increase.
Rocket science this isn’t. They aren’t making any more oil so, over time, you had to figure it was going to get more expensive and more scarce. So why weren’t other manufacturers able to see the road ahead as well as Honda?
1. They got sidetracked by the easy profits available in big SUVs and pickups. During the 1990s, the last golden age of the American auto industry, the combination of cheap gas and high-profit big vehicles seduced automakers into believing the good times would never end.
2. Honda’s tightly-knit corporate culture and long time horizon made it uniquely able to wait for events to move in its direction, rather than chasing fluctuations in the marketplace.
3. The other automakers became distracted by their own corporate imperatives. Nissan compounded its problems by starting its own passenger car horsepower race. The Detroit Three, at times, seemed to get their jollies by reviving models from 40 years ago — Mustang, Challenger, Camaro — because of the short term jolt they got in the marketplace, rather than formulating any kind of long-term strategy for a resource-constrained world.
