It is that time again, the beginning of a month. Auto manufacturers have released their January 2009 sales figures. If you are looking for good news, I suggest you read about the relative success of this year’s North American International Auto Show. If you want to see how 2009 started then please, keep reading.

Domestic Auto Manufacturers

Let’s start with the Detroit 3. GM and Chrysler were not sure they would make it to the end of 2008 without billions of dollars of aide. They got the money, made it through the end of the year without a bankruptcy and January was a horrible month for all three of them. I will start with the “good” news. Ford Motor Co.’s sales were only 41.6% lower than they were in January 2008. Yes, you read that right, that is the good news.

It gets uglier. General Motors posted a 48.9% decline over January 2008. Chrysler finished the month of January selling 75,235 fewer vehicles than they did in January 2008. This represents a 54.8% decline in sales.

Imports

There is some legitimate good news on the import front. It looks like Hyundai’s buyback program garnered the company some sales. When compared to January 2008, Hyundai experienced an 8.9% increase in sales. Subaru joined Hyundai in the positive column with an 8% increase in sales when compared to January 2008. The good news stops there.

Toyota experienced a 31.7% decline over January 2008 sales, American Honda posted a 27.9% decrease and Nissan’s sales were 29.7% lower than in January of 2008.

Overall, sales of vehicles in the United States were down by 37.1%. In January of 2008, 1,045,037 vehicles were sold in the domestic market. Only 656,881 vehicles were sold this past month. As the state of the United States economy continues on its rocky and unknown trend, it is likely that these figures will continue for months to come.

Source: Figures for this article were obtained from the Automotive News sales chart.

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