Counting retail sales alone, Toyota was America's number one brand in 2009. The Asian maker hopes to keep that momentum going with products like the newly-remade Sienna minivan.
Sales of new cars and trucks weren’t exactly booming during December but the adjusted annual sales rate was still strong enough to suggest that sales finally bottomed out as the U.S. auto industry wrapped up its worst year in nearly four decades.
Carmakers pegged the estimated sales rate at 11.4 million units, which is still well below the sales levels that prevailed before the recession gripped the industry in 2008, but substantially better than what the industry suffered through for most of the past year.
Industry Insight!
For all of 2009, sales totaled approximately 10.4 million units, which was only slightly better than the expectation in early 2009 when carmakers were talking about sales in the sub-10 million-unit range – and may reflect the brief, mid-year boost the market got from the so-called Cash for Clunkers program.
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