Originally Posted by Supercup
From a sale perspective the number trends don't look to positive for the Camaro! Pretty consistent sales from 10 - 15 (Gen 5), with natural trail off in 2015, with new car coming out. Gen 6 - big drop and declining since, now stable at about 50k, a 40% decline in sales - from 14 to 18/19? So is the Camaro no longer interesting or relevant or did it get too small (trunk on Gen 6 sucks).
Mustang got good sales bump with new model as well, so the may have stolen some sales from recent years. Challenger has been building and now stable at 65k per year. Trend for 2019 - is about a 10% drop in sales across the board for all three carsl, which makes sense as there is nothing new!
So why spend a lot of $ to develop a market segment that seems to be split up 3 ways and trending in the wrong dirction? The buyer pool does not seem to be as broad - for example the Mustang sold between 117k - 169k per year from 1994 - 2007 the Camaro and Challenger were absent in the highest sales years for the Mustang.
The Challenger was the new kid on the block and has grown sales from zilch in 2008 to a steady 64k-66k per year - so they are taking some sales from Camaro and Mustang as well, but the Mustang has certainly held up better than the Camaro.
Seems both the Challenger and the Mustang are offering a product that more people want. Mustang is very similar, but has more room and bigger trunk. Challenger is bigger still and has more room overall. So the Gen 6 is a better platform for performance, but it may not be delivering what the customer wants. When you factor in the Challenger sales, it would appear the Camaro and Mustang have lost a lot of ground to it.
The Camaro will likely loose even more sales of the Chevrolet faithful to the C8 corvettes going forward, so for GM the $ should be spent here developing the platform and offering as many variations and price points as they can for the C8, to maximize sales (a la the Porsche 911 with 18 interations).
That leaves the Camaro looking to play in the lower price segement for the car (less than $55k) - so will that be a product that will sell and how do they compete with Mustang and Challenger, when their products have a broader appeal and functionality? Will it make sense to have low volume segments for Camaro like ZL1 and ZLE for bragging rights with Mustang - if they are willing to use motors developed for the C8, they certainly can - but what about development of the rest of the car?
EV suits the size of the Mustang and Challenger - so Comaro has to get more usable (likley larger) to compete with Mustang and Challenger if they go EV with these platforms.
Camaro as we know it is likley going to go EV or take a break in production after Gen 6 - so as it turns out better performance, at the expense of functionality is not a successsful formula for the Gen 6.
Another factor that has changed the car business is the 72 month loan - this is the primary loan term selected and it is pushing down the road future sales and was a big mistake by mfg's to spur sales. This was a way to offset the higher cost of cars, but has come at a price of longer ownership life cycles. In addtion up to 2007 leased cars were a huge segment and that dropped after mfg.'s got stuck with cars with too high residuals and took losses after getting them back, so the correctly priced the leases and this reduced total sales in this segment - again extending the buying cycle from 3 year to 5 - 7.
So many factor in play here that it is hard to know what the future holds, but sale figures below do say that there are 200,000 people per year who want a Camaro/Mustang/Challenger type vehicle to drive - and that number is pretty solid and has been stable for 20 + years - pretty hard to walk away from that, but if Chevrolet does, they certainly will get thank you notes from Ford and Dodge!
Chevrolet, either needs to either kill the Camaro or work on moving as many of those sale as they can to the Corvette as possilble or keep the Camaro and refocus on total function versus Mustang and Challenger - with the back seat and trunk being key factors why you buy a Camaro and not a Corvette! Problem is at 50k cars per year the bean counters will not be wanting to give a green light for more development costs, unless they can support a sales case for 80k cars or more.
Sales Results - USA -
Year Camaro Mustang Challenger Total
2019 36,791 55,365 46,699 139,146 - (Jan - Sept)
2018 50,963 75,842 66,716 193,251
2017 67,940 81,866 64,537 214,334
2016 72,705 105,932 64,478 243,385
2015 77,502 122,430 66,365 266,297
2014 86,297 82,635 51,611 220,643
2013 80,567 77,186 51,462 209,395
2012 84,391 82,995 43,119 210,505
2011 88,249 70,438 39,534 198,221
2010 81,299 73,416 36,791 191,506
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