Total Vehicle Sales

Total Vehicle Sales is the monthly count of new retail vehicle deliveries in the United States since 1976. It comes from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) of the U.S. Department of Commerce, feeding NIPA (National Income and Product Accounts) vehicle estimates. It covers passenger cars plus light trucks, including SUVs, crossovers, minivans and pickups.

Results appear as SAAR (Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate), monthly sales with seasonal patterns removed and multiplied by 12, alongside NSA (not seasonally adjusted) counts. It excludes used vehicles, heavy trucks, buses, motorcycles, factory output, dollar revenue and exports, but includes a small business share.

BEA posts results a few days after the measured month ends, at the beginning of the next month, with no fixed hour. Times are U.S. Eastern for reference.

Each release shows autos versus light trucks, each split into domestic and imports, in NSA units and SAAR. Domestic means assembled in the United States, Canada or Mexico. The wider file also carries production, end-of-quarter inventories and inventory-to-sales ratios, and average expenditure per vehicle.

Each release revises the prior month, and each year BEA re-estimates seasonal factors for at least the prior 5 years. Vendors show Actual versus Forecast versus Previous in millions of units SAAR, and greater than expected reads as good for the currency. With no publisher threshold, reading is level and direction plus the car-truck mix, a consumer spending and leading signal at turning points.

Totals sum seasonally adjusted parts, so shifts in body type or assembly origin move the headline.

• Autos: sedans, coupes and similar passenger cars, the shrinking share of sales.
• Light trucks: SUVs, crossovers, minivans and pickups, the dominant and growing share.
• Domestic vs imports: another cut across both body types by assembly place.

In April 2020 BEA estimated sales at 8.58 million SAAR, down 24.5% from March and down 47.9% from April 2019. The reading was released May 4, 2020. March was revised from 11.37 million to 11.36 million, and April later rose from 8.58 million to 8.73 million.

May 2020 was estimated at 12.21 million SAAR, released June 3, 2020, up 40.0% from April and down 29.8% from a year earlier. Only 729,000 vehicles changed hands that month; the SAAR was the lowest since 1976 and the NSA count the lowest since early 2010. Cars fell 59% year on year and light trucks fell 42%, lifting trucks to 77% of sales versus 72% in 2019. The lesson is to read SAAR with NSA counts and the car-truck split, since headline drops can hide a record truck share.

1. Collection: Units by model come from Wards Intelligence dealer and manufacturer reports, summed across models for the measured month.
2. Classification: Each unit is placed in one of 4 groups: domestic auto, import auto, domestic light truck or import light truck. Personal, business and government shares come from IHS-Polk monthly registrations, with a mixed-use auto adjustment. J.D. Power retail prices by make, model and trim feed the dollar valuation only, not the unit count.
3. Seasonal adjustment: BEA seasonally adjusts each component using Federal Reserve seasonal factors and the Census Bureau X-13ARIMA-SEATS program. The SAAR total sums the adjusted parts, so SA total equals SA autos plus SA trucks.
4. Annualization: Multiply the adjusted monthly total by 12 and report the result in millions of units SAAR. As an illustration, 1,000,000 NSA units become about 1,004,402 adjusted units. Times 12, that equals about 12.1 million SAAR: 4.7 million autos and 7.3 million light trucks.
5. Publication and revision: BEA publishes both the NSA monthly count and SAAR. Each release revises the prior month, and each year BEA re-estimates seasonal factors for at least the prior 5 years.