New-car sales still strong

The new-car market appears to be showing no signs of easing off the accelerator, with figures to be released Wednesday expected to reveal the third consecutive month this year of strong, double-digit growth.

Despite the recent troubles in large-car sales, the Holden Commodore seems well on its way to becoming Australia's favourite car for the 15th year in a row, posting approximately 4200 sales to the Ford Falcon's 2500 and the Toyota Aurion's 1000.

This means that, despite a close shave in January, where the Commodore was just 18 sales away from being overtaken for the lead by the Mazda3 small car, the Commodore has had a clean-sweep winning all three individual months in the first quarter of 2010.

The March figures to be released by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries this week are also expected to show that the Mazda3 is the second-best seller so far this year, ahead of the Toyota Corolla small car and Toyota Hilux utility. However, in a major upset, the Hyundai i30 small car (pictured) is understood to have beaten the Corolla for the month of March.

Presumably, Hyundai i30 sales were buoyed by the fitment of side and curtain airbags for the 2010 model year, which also prompted $1000 discounts on 2009 models without the extra airbags.

While Hyundai has outsold Toyota in the Light Car class for some time now (Getz versus Yaris), the March result is understood to be the first time the i30 has outsold Toyota in the Small Car class.

In some regards the result is a long overdue return to form for Hyundai.

For four years in a row, from 1996 to 1999, the humble $13,990 drive-away, no-more-to-pay Hyundai Excel outsold the Corolla and also became Australia's best-selling car on a number of individual months, even ahead of Commodore, which at the time was selling at twice today's rate.

Meanwhile, in the brand stakes, official sales figures are expected to show that Toyota is out of the doldrums, eclipsing 20,000 sales for the month for the first time this year.

Toyota's March tally is expected to be slightly higher than the combined total of Holden's and Ford's tally (just shy of 12,000 and a little more than 8000 respectively).

Figures for Hyundai are expected to show that the Korean brand may have narrowly overtaken Mazda for fourth place outright. In February, Hyundai was just 245 sales behind Mazda for the first two months of the year. But Mazda is expected to post 7450 sales for March while Hyundai is expected to post a figure close to 7800.

In the medium-sized softroader class, the Holden Captiva (presumably buoyed by its new cut-price five-seat model) continues to outsell the Toyota Kluger and Ford Territory, while the Subaru Forester continues to lead the compact softroader class.

As this story was published, only Suzuki had made an official announcement for its March 2010 sales result. The Japanese small car specialist posted its third best month ever on record and a massive 50 per cent increase on the same month last year.

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