GrigioTL

Acura Announces December and Year End Sales Results

TL Leads December Sales While All-New ZDX Hits Showrooms

TORRANCE, Calif., Jan. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- Acura's TL performance luxury sedan led December sales with 3,167 units sold, closely followed by TSX sports sedan sales of 2,926, up an impressive 17.9 percent. Strong sales of light trucks helped Acura achieve December sales of 10,575 units, a decrease of 8.1 percent based on the daily selling rate*. Acura year-to-date sales** reached 105,723, down 26.8 percent compared to 2008.

"The TL performance luxury sedan is gaining traction in the marketplace thanks to the availability of Super Handling All-Wheel Drive and an all-new 6-speed manual transmission model," said Jeff Conrad, vice president of Acura sales. "The TL has long been Acura's best selling sedan and December sales proved that the TL offers a great combination of performance, luxury, innovation and safety."

December marked the launch of Acura's all-new ZDX four-door sports coupe that began hitting dealerships mid month. While production slowly ramped up in December, 79 ZDX were sold in just a few days of sales. The MDX luxury SUV again led Acura light truck sales with 2,899 units (down 20.4 percent*), followed by RDX sales of 1,283 (up 4.4 percent*). Total Acura light truck sales tallied 4,261 for December (down 12.5 percent) while Acura car sales totaled 6,314 (down 4.8 percent).

Pete2010

Personally, I think this is totally because of the 6MT + SHAWD. Also known as the greatest Acura ever made (sans NSX).

Although I may be biased.

docboy

That's nice to hear.

I wonder what the sales number of the 2010 6MT model look like?

I'm not sure if people are more accepting of the 4G TL's design, or if the gradual upswing in the economy is allowing people to shop more expensive models (ie. TL over TSX because of price). Whatever the case, I'm sure Acura knows what they are doing.

Good job Acura.

docboy

+1

I may also be biased, not sure why

StuartMMVITL

iTrader: (1)

^ Same here. The 6MT was the reason I purchased another TL to replace my '06 TL 6MT. I wasn't even considering the TL until they added that for 2010.

DrewSRX

Here is how the class stacks up:

December 2009 Sales

Entry-Level
1. 3 - 8,963
2. ES - 6,531
3. G - 5,167
4. A4/5 - 4,937
5. C - 4,849
6. CTS - 4,180
7. IS - 4,153
8. TL - 3,167
9. MKZ - 2,190
10. 9-3 - 699
11. S60 - 25

jzacuto

I get the G, I totally understand the A4/5, I even get the CTS. But just what buyers continue to see in the over-rated 3-series, the "old man's" ES and that cheap, plasticy IS is far beyond me.

BMW's styling continues to be unremarkable, Lexus ES is a big ol' bore and the IS is so cheap on the low-end and SO not worth the extraordinary cost on the high end.

And of all the competitors to the TL, they look like a great value for the entry model, but when you add even just navigation or any "premium" upgrades that Acura includes, the MSRP goes off the chart.

Dollar for dollar, Acura delivers the goods.

Fine... Call it the "value luxury brand" if you will.

Anyone who's got any common sense in today's economy certainly won't take that as an insult.

Smart luxury indeed!

winstrolvtec

All three of those vehicles have a very high female customer base, I will leave it at that.

HiroY

Although I'm another biased person, I'm glad I was able to help Acura's December sales numbers with the purchase of my 6MT

Speaking of the 3-series, when I personally cross-shopped that model, the thing that stuck out the most for me was how spartan and bland the dash/console was, especially in comparison to the TL. I know some have criticized the TL's dash/console as being too busy, but I personally found the 3-series to be at the polar opposite end of the spectrum. Being the engineer and gadget geek that I am, I was definitely more attracted to the TL's high-tech cockpit feel...

BG74

Look at the 3G TL's first December...7,211 '04 cars sold with 77,895 YTD.

Recession or not, that's a 144% difference.

Kingmeow

(took too long to respond)

"All three of those vehicles have a very high female customer base, I will leave it at that."

LOL! And we'll leave it at that!

Kingmeow

Engineer too (Mechanical) and I like buttons.

docboy

I smell troll.

So what's your point? The 4G TL is marketed towards a different buyer than that of the 3G TL.

docboy

+1

Buttons are fun to push

ssim3

Apparently the general public prefers a spartan interior, or even worse the cursed I drive to buttons at an almost 3:1 ratio.

Silva-type-s

iTrader: (3)

the TL is the best selling acura period

KeithL

The price and styling have to be a big factor, the G has always lagged the TL until the 4G TL and now the G has months that it blows the TL away. Acura needs to wake up, if they are happy with these numbers fine, but the 3G TL always outsold the G by a large margin

chaiwala

A friend and a customer of mine just got a 2010 535i. Sweet car and totally opposite of the TL as in the dash looks empty after being used to buttons galore in the TL. About the iDrive, it actually is now more user friendly than the TL. There are dedicated buttons for each function surrounding the knob and I absolutely LOVE the location of the knob, its more comfortable navigating the button while resting your arm on the arm rest. Big to BMW for listening to their customers.

George Knighton

I agree with you 100%. BMW enjoys a popularity among drivers who view themselves as enthusiasts...but you can't even buy an LSD on a BMW 3 series unless you ante up for the M series.

That's exactly what I think.

George Knighton

About the complicated array of buttons:

I've been avoiding bifocals for about five years. Needing to look at all those buttons is probably finally going to put me over the edge!

wutaguy

Acura has the TSX below the TL whereas Infinti only has the G and nothing below it. Considering the bigger size of the TL that is actually bigger than BMW 5 and MB E, and we look at both the TSX and TL, than Acura may be doing OK.

winstrolvtec

The TL is doing fine and Acura sales are strong. In 09 the TL was the best selling car for Acura which happens to be the fourth best selling luxury brand in the states on what is still a smaller selection of vehicle under the brand compared to most.

The TL also is not a real direct competitor to anything and does not fully compete in the entry segment which happens to be the largest sale base in the luxury industry. It falls in the entry price range but it's mid in size and level in the Acura sedan lineup. The TSX is not down nearly as much as the rest given the economic trend indicating that it picked up where the TL may have fallen off but that is normal given the circumstances and for what Acura has planned and is trying to do.

As far as the G comparison, the TL has outsold the G sedan for 09 and we know that the TL sales are based highly on the FWD version and that is respectable given just how strong the competition is against that model TL and just how much more competition there is in that type of vehicle now than there was when the 3G was around. Other cars may outsell the TL as a whole but they have coupes and other variants to throw into consideration, if you are buying a sedan you shop a sedan and likewise for a coupe. The TL is right in line and not far behind when looking at it as so and let's not forget the TSX gets thrown into that mix too.

I know someone will say well they are still buying the G or A4/5, for example, and not the TL regardless of whether it is coupe, covertible or sedan but if you want to look at it like that than many are still buying Acura and not Infinti or Audi.

bw5556

I wonder how many of those 3s were sold in LA... I don't know why people drive them here. Even the M3 is an everyman's car. There are over 150 occupied apartments in my building and each unit gets at least one parking space in our structure. There are no less that 25 3series...

LessisBestmakingendsmeet

Read below....it didn't even meet 50% of its sales goal. There is nothing to argue here. They said the goal, they didn't come close to meeting it.



The false sense of reality in this thread is staggering. Please see the link below SpicyMikey posted.

Silva-type-s

iTrader: (3)

^ regardless whether it met the goal or not, its the best selling Acura period

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Acura TL is a mid-size luxury car from Honda's Acura brand. It was introduced in 1996 to supplant the Acura Vigor and was rebadged for the Japanese-market from 1996 to 2000 as the Honda Inspire and from 1996 to 2004 as the Honda Saber. The TL is Acura's best-selling model, and it has ranked as the second best-selling luxury sedan in the United States behind the BMW 3 Series.[1] Four generations of the Acura TL have been produced to date, with the latest fourth generation TL premiering in 2008 as a 2009 model. The current version is not sold in Japan.


The false sense of reality in this thread is indeed staggering
kthnxbye.

winstrolvtec

Obviously the initial sales goal was set prior to the economic decline of the auto industry. It was not very reflective of today's market and was based on the previous success of the 3G TL which was a different car at a different time with a different price. Sometimes you have to plan on exceeding expectations in order to hit whats reasonable. Nontheless the 3G was Acura's best seller and so is the 4G, that has not changed indicating economics has a very large part in it. I guess everyone else must be hitting their sales goals and only the TL comes up short.

Acura did worse in terms of sales decline in percentage but that is mostly dependent on how it did last year too. The vehicles with less decline didn't sell much last year nor did they sell many units this year that is why some posted a positive or barely a loss in percentage compared to last year.

The truth is in the total number of units sold, not percentages.

winstrolvtec

To further elaborate, business A (Acura) had a 26.8% decline rate at the end of 09 selling 105,723 units compared to 144,504 one year before.

Business B only had a 5.7% decline rate selling 82,716 in 09 and almost the same in 08 with 87,760.

Business C was fortunate enough to sell more units in 09 than 08. 72,378 units compared to 68,759, a 5% increase.

It's still easy to see who is selling more units and doing better business as a whole. The media loves to use pecentages because it's easy to manipluate what you can write and creates more story than just what the bottom line numbers are.

I don't even need to get into how Honda/Acura chooses to manufacter it's cars and how that creates more profit out of a single unit than what many other luxury brands see. While others like BMW kill it in the sales department, consistantly #1 or #2 for a luxury brand in the states year in and year out, doubling most luxury brand sales, plus their global sales too and that includes Rolls Royce, the MINI group, and their motorbikes also and they barely posted a profit.

chaiwala

People who believe that the TL is doing well does need a reality check. When one goes to the dealership and see that they have to ALTER the grille to make it more appetizing to the consumers tells the WHOLE story. I don't know of any other automobile out there that the dealerships are modifying to make it more visually attractive to the consumers. Things are NOT right when you have to go that route. And to blame it on the economy is just plain silly. Its funny how the economy are not affecting the Lexus ES and IS sales as much as it does for the TL. Enough said and these monthly threads about the same discussions are getting old fast. Like someone once said, it is what it is.

bw5556

The truth is in the percentages. What if company A sells 100 products in year 1 and 80 in year two while company B sells 50 producs in year 1 and 40 in year 2? Using that rationale means that company B did "better" than company A when they both experienced a 20% decline in sales. The sales data by itself will tell you nothing unless you are comparing companies of similar size that sold the same number of products in the base year. You must use common sizing to do cross sectional analyses.

Nonetheless, I completely understand the point you are making. Unfortunately, the percentages are just of the wrong variety to determine "who did worse". A decline in sales is a decline in sales is a decline in sales. Its not uncommon (especially today) to see a company with declining sales to have improving profit margins. For me, a more interesting and albeit useful chart would show YoY changes in gross profit margins and operating profit margins.

Silva-type-s

iTrader: (3)

the car is not really doing well, its still the best selling acura but i think the 4g (even though i think its nice) is killing it.

Colin

I think the truth is somewhere in between the two extremes. It's not doing as well as Acura would like, but not as badly as some would make it seem. Yes, we've painted the grill on our service loaner, but the number of actual customers that opt to paint has been 1-2. (not saying they're not doing it on their own, as I cannot speak for that).

winstrolvtec

All I am trying to say is that everyone wants to make the car out as doing so poorly but looking at how the current TL is doing in the current market agianst the current competition it's actually above average as in if you took averages it's sales are above that mark.

To me good is good, average is average and poor is poor and so on and so forth. Forget about percentages from whenever till now, this month or that month or what the 3G did in comparison. I am not saying that, obviously from the 3G and how it used to sell the TL is not doing so well maybe even despite the economy and it probably is largely due to the styling but it's a different car at a different time so to be as fair as I know how this is I how I look at it.

09 Total # of Sold Units
ES- 48,485 -24.4%
IS- 38,077 -23%
A4- 37,070 -14.5%
G - 32,357 -28% (sedan)
C - 52,427 - 27.7%
TL - 33,620 -28.1%
CTS-38,817 -34%
TSX-28,650 - 10.5%
LaX- 27,818 - 24.6%
MKZ- 2,190
9-3 - 699 - 64.2%
S60 - 25

GrigioTL

I totally agree with you. Anyone who thinks the TL is doing well is probably in a sense of denial. The numbers are what they are! Usually in forecasting, newly launched products have an advantage over older competitive products but that is not the case for the TL. Someone definitely screwed up the formula here!

Ac Man

Something you guys might want to consider, is that Acura shut down a lot of production last year because of the economy. So if you don't produce many vehicles, you really can't expect to sell many vehicles. I bet if we had a chart that showed number of vehicles produced compared to the number of vehicles sold, that Acura did very well. Honda is a very smart company, which is why they are always making a profit. Yearly numbers and percentages don't mean too much if you're losing money, or just breaking even, i.e the "Big 3".

BG74

My local dealer has almost 40 4Gs on the lot, and many of those are '09s.

winstrolvtec

This may be true but it's no secret Acura cut production on 09's early and sold most of them months before the 2010's came out while cars like the G, just for example, are still a plenty even though their 2010 model is already out and in full production.

A quick dealer check for the entire country shows only 525 total unsold 09 TL units. There are some dealers who don't report to some inventory based sites but some of those cars have also probably already sold and have not been updated.

No one is suggesting that there was nothing or it was some kind of massive shortage. For the most part if you wanted a TL late summer you could get one but your choices were very limted and dealers are not in the best position to swap when this happens.

Most of my local dealers waited 2 months for the 2010's to come in with maybe only 10-25 09's in stock for that whole time and another month to fill their inventories back up. They now average about 50 units with consistent restock. I would imagine they like to have at least three or fours cars for everyone one actual customer in order to sell them on something they actually have in stock.

I wouldn't be surprised if areas like the Southern, Western, and Mid-Western parts of the country have plenty of 09 and 10' inventory for obvious reasons. You got to figure any left over 09's are probably really hard to sell with the 10's going for what they are and with the agressive incentives Acura has given them there is really no reason to buy 09 over 10', especially with more leasing going on.

I don't want to say the 09 production cut was necessarily a good move or a bad move but I am sure it allowed Acura to get strong incentives for the 10' out early and it allowed dealers to sell the new model instead of trying to push the 09's on the customers.

Colin

There were all kinds of inventory problems all summer long. This include too many at one place with none at another, or too many (40) of the wrong car. It does not help if you have 40 FWD base and you need Techs or AWD. With no production for 2-3 months, you cannot order cars to fill the 'holes' in inventory. This will slow sales even though you appear to be overstocked.

Ac Man

Thank you Colin for backing up my point! I bought my '09 TL on the 1st of August, and I had to "Settle" on my TL because there was only "1" SH-AWD with Tech. They had about 6 FWD and 2 SH-AWD without tech. I didn't get the color that wanted, but I still love what I got. The dealership told me that what they had was all the '09s they would get, and that their next shipment would be the '10s in a few months. I pulled the trigger instead of waiting for the '10s, but many customers felt that they could wait for the '10s to arrive. It was a must that I purchase the SH-AWD w/tech, I already had to settle for a different color combo, but I would not budge on the model. And I am pretty sure a lot of potential customers at the time felt the same way!

I hate it when people say "My dealership had 40 TLs on the lot", as if their dealership represents the entire country. We all know that inventories vary from state to state, but I am willing to bet that all the high volume "selling" dealerships around the country experienced what my dealership did! I went to 2 dealerships in Boston, 1 in New York, and the dealership in Virginia where I ended up buying my car (I'm in the military, so I travel a lot! Lol . So I am speaking from experience, not assumption.

BEAR-AvHistory

It does not look like all this pent up demand translated into a December sales surge.

Ac Man

But how do we know if supply is meeting demand right now? Everyone keeps assuming that there is a ton of TLs out there to buy, and that might not be the case. I am one of those who thinks the economy and production shortages, has more to do with the overall sales being low than the styling. However, I am not a fool, I do realize that many people are turned off by the styling. It has a very polarizing look, and many folks haven't got used to it yet. Some never will get used to it! Lol.