A five year peak on car sales was reached last year. Even the sales of Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger had to suffer a 8.4% decline. You might start to worry about US's auto market, but that's not really the case since the drop matches more for small cars and not crossovers and SUVs, since they keep on growing. But what does the cool-down for muscle-cars in America mean?
Is there any deep meaning in this decrease? Well, customers who buy Mustangs, Camaros and Challengers do that because their interested in some modern evocations of the early 60's performance cars, and not because they really need them. Even luxury car sales have fallen 13% year to date in total market, and that's up to 1.1%. In 2015 muscle car-sales shot up 22.6% for the first seven months, while in 2014 these cars where almost the biggest part of the market. This year the sales have dropped even more comparing to last year, Mustang is down to 5.5%, with about 72,500 units, Camaro is down to 15.4% with 42,354 units and Challenger went down to 5.5% with 39,998 units. Chevrolet gave to the muscle-car market a big boost, but that was almost 6 years ago, in 2010, and now it slowly goes to the bottom.
This story of decline in auto sales isn't that simple, considering the muscle cars are still keeping it strong, the segment got some loyalty within the last five years. Almost 25% of the customers who owned a Mustang, Camaro or Challenger and came back for a car now, stayed with their favorites. There are still customers who feel more attracted to the small cars rather than SUVs and pickups, but they need some impulse to come back for a newer model. No matter what's going on with the overall car sales, that's for sure not because of the lack of product capability or effort, that's because that is what the market can bear in terms of product quality.
