by Calculated Risk on 7/01/2011 03:18:00 PM

A few comments:
• Obviously the Japanese supply chain disruption impacted auto sales significantly in May and June. This has also negatively impacted manufacturing overall.

• The good news is the supply issues are being resolved ahead of schedule and the automakers expect sales to be back up over 13 million Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR) by August.

• The automakers lowered their incentives again in June, and this also impacted sales. From TrueCar.com:

“The upside to a lack of inventory on some vehicles is that incentives decreased and transaction prices soared to the highest levels ever recorded ...” said Jesse Toprak, VP of Industry Trends and Insights for TrueCar.com.

Larger incentives will return soon, especially for cars that haven't been selling well.

• The California sales tax was reduced 1% starting on July 1st. This probably delayed some purchases in California from June to July.

Click on graph for larger image in graph gallery.

Based on an estimate from Autodata Corp, light vehicle sales were at a 11.45 million SAAR in June. That is up 2.8% from June 2010, and down 2.6% from the sales rate last month (May 2011).

This graph shows the historical light vehicle sales (seasonally adjusted annual rate) from the BEA (blue) and an estimate for June (red, light vehicle sales of 11.45 million SAAR from Autodata Corp).

The second graph shows light vehicle sales since the BEA started keeping data in 1967.

Note: dashed line is current estimated sales rate.

This was well below the consensus estimate of 12 million SAAR. However I expect a bounce back in sales over the next couple of months.