Toyota’s late-January safety recall of 2.3 millions vehicles cost its retailers 20,000 sales for the month, Toyota Division General Manager Bob Carter said.
Toyota Division’s January sales, including Scion’s, fell 19 percent from January 2009 to 83,279 cars and light trucks, compared with 102,565 a year ago. Lexus Division sales rose 5 percent in January to 15,517 vehicles.
But Carter told reporters this afternoon in a conference call that the Toyota numbers came in 23 percent below the brand’s own internal forecasts for the month.
He admitted that halting U.S. sales of eight key models on Jan. 26, including the Camry and Corolla, had made it difficult to interpret Toyota’s month-end results.
Carter said he has been talking with hundreds of dealers in the past few days as the company dealt with news of a faulty gas pedal being responsible for unintended acceleration.
The combination of putting a stop-sale on eight core models and the resulting negative publicity clearly hurt the sales numbers, Carter said. But he said, anecdotally, that retailers think Toyota is not losing customers over the recall, even though other automakers are targeting Toyota buyers.
“Dealers are telling me consistently there is minimal to no effect on our business,” Carter said. “Most of our consumers are confident in the brand, and many of them are just delaying their purchases if they’re in the market.”
The brand’s sales results for the month do not strictly line up with the loss of a week’s worth of sales of eight models. For example, the Scion xB, which was not involved in the recall, declined 19 percent. Sales of the Sienna minivan, which also was not recalled, fell 60 percent. But a redesigned Sienna goes on sale this month.
