While September’s Canadian auto sales offered some glimmer of hope for improvement, October’s sales numbers laid waste to any such optimism.
Sales of 121,653 new units in October, as estimated by DesRosiers Automotive Consultants (DAC), were down by 5.4% from the same month in 2021 – one of the stronger comparables of this year.
But that point of comparison, October 2021, was already severely depressed, down almost 20% from typical pre-pandemic levels, which leaves October 2022 with the lowest sales total for the month since the recession of 2009.
That situation is reflected in the SAAR (Seasonally Adjusted Annualized Sales Rate) for the month which remained below 1.5-million, according to DAC – consistent with its performance over the past six months but well below the pre-pandemic norm of 1.9-million.
Estimated year-to-date sales of 1,264,964 vehicles through October were down 11.2% from the same period in 2021, and almost 25% below the pre-pandemic norm for that month.
“As has been the pattern recently, sales were highly varied with a small group of players showing robust sales gains, while the majority continued to struggle and experienced double-digit declines,” according to DAC.
DAC Managing Partner, Andrew King added, “until the recovery becomes more broadly based across a wider group of manufacturers the market will continue to struggle.”
