A stormy winter of piling-on snow and ice and slick and slushy roads mined with rim-bending potholes have driven a certain kind of weather-wary buyer to Jonathan Grant’s Central Avenue Chrysler Jeep Dodge Ram dealership in Yonkers.
“I’m seeing huge demand for sport utilities – unprecedented,” said Grant, who also owns Central Avenue Nissan in Yonkers, Hyundai of White Plains and White Plains Chrysler Jeep Dodge. “The sport utility business in the first two months of this year is off the charts.”
Grant doesn’t expect the demand for SUVs to be a one-season phenomenon in a county hit by a series of severe storms in recent years.
“I think people are going to think long and hard about living in Westchester and not having a sport utility vehicle. It’s getting really hard,” he said.
Auto shoppers’ severe weather concerns could combine with relatively low prices at the gas pump this year to slow demand for compact cars.
“Gas prices being as low as they are, I don’t think it’s helped the smaller car market,” Grant said. “When gas is as low-priced and as plentiful as it is now, I think that puts a crimp in the small car market.”
Like other dealers in the county and nationwide, Grant suffered through the worst of times in the auto industry in 2008 and 2009, when sales dropped 50 percent at his dealerships over an 18-month period. “In my 25 years doing this, it was the most difficult experience I went through.”
Since then, though, “We’ve recovered nicely. It’s been an upswing every year since then.”
Business in 2013 “was good,” he said. “We were up about 25 percent over the previous year.”
Dealers in metropolitan New York – including the five boroughs, Long Island, Westchester and Rockland counties – saw a 6 percent increase in sales of cars and light trucks in 2013, according to data from R.L. Polk & Co. released by the Greater New York Automobile Dealers Association. The downstate increase, though, was below the pace of national sales in 2013, which rose 9 percent from 2012, Polk reported. Sales in the metro area in 2012 rose nearly 12 percent from 2011, nearly double the sales volume increase of 2013.
Metro buyers increasingly are leaving dealer lots in new pickup trucks and SUVs. While car sales grew by 2.1 percent in the region last year, sales of light trucks rose 10.7 percent and accounted for nearly 48 percent of the 489,700 retail vehicles sold here.
Japanese auto brands accounted for half of all sales in the metro area in 2013. The 244,302 Japanese vehicles sold here was a 4.8 percent increase from 2012. Mazda, with 7,727 new cars registered at Department of Motor Vehicle offices in the metro region in 2013, saw sales rise by more than 24 percent for the year. Subaru sales in the region rose nearly 20 percent last year.
U.S. auto brands grabbed a 24 percent share of the metro market in 2013, when purchases of Detroit’s Big Three models jumped 15 percent in New York auto dealers’ showrooms.
European brands accounted for 19 percent of the metro auto market in 2013, with sales up 6.4 percent in the area from 2012.
BMW and Audi led the European field in metro showrooms with sales increases for the year of 16.4 percent and 9.9 percent, respectively.
Only Korean autos lost popularity with metro auto buyers in 2013, with sales dropping more than 10 percent from 2012. Sales of Hyundai models dropped nearly 14 percent from the previous year.
In Westchester, Grant’s U.S. auto dealerships profited from the light-truck trend and a wave of renewed popularity for Chrysler and Dodge brands.
Chrysler sales in the metro area increased 34 percent in 2013, while Dodge sales jumped 47.5 percent, the largest increase in the region for all gas-fueled vehicles. California-based Tesla Motors Inc. sold 569 electric cars in the region last year, a nearly 2,089 percent increase from 2012.
Metropolitan sales of Chrysler’s Ram trucks jumped nearly 44 percent last year. Sales of GMC trucks and SUVs rose nearly 36 percent.
In the luxury market, 993 new Jaguar owners registered at metro DMV offices last year, a nearly 45 percent increase from 2012. General Motors Co.’s Cadillac division saw a nearly 19 percent increase in metro sales last year.
With 7,028 new cars sold in the region, Cadillac still chugged well behind foreign luxury brands popular with urban and suburban New Yorkers. Mercedes added 28,444 new owners in the region last year, up nearly 8 percent from 2012. Toyota’s Lexus luxury line notched 16,259 sales on dealer floors in 2013, up more than 12 percent.
At the start of a long, rugged winter, metro auto dealers saw an overall 12 percent drop in sales in December. That chilly performance was followed in January by an estimated 5 percent drop in the regional market from a year earlier, according to the market research firm Auto Outlook.
The market for new autos is expected to pick up in 2014, although industry analysts predict sales growth again will be slower than the previous year’s.
For the metropolitan market, analysts at Polk predict a 3.9 percent improvement in 2014.
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