Just eight years ago, the Honda brand attracted 143 percent more new vehicle buyers in Canada than Nissan. Honda, with its indomitable Civic, has been the perpetual victor in the race to end each year with Canada’s best-selling car for the last 17 years.
Recently hasn’t shown many signs of slowing down either; 2014 was the highest-volume year in the company’s Canadian history. Through the first two months of 2015, however, Honda brand sales have tumbled six percent as the brand’s core passenger cars – Civic and Accord – have fallen 24 percent. This represents a loss of nearly 2,000 sales for the company’s Canadian dealers through two months of this year.
Much like Honda, set (a record year for the Canadian auto industry as a whole) with both its Nissan and Infiniti brands.
While Honda’s growth has stalled at the start of 2015, Nissan’s has not. Sales for the Nissan brand jumped 15 percent in January, narrowing the monthly gap between the two brands to just 89 units. Then, in February, as year-over-year Nissan sales jumped 20 percent and year-over-year Honda sales fell eight percent, Nissan actually outsold the traditionally better-selling Honda brand by 13 units.
While this represents a small margin, it is a meaningful one. Until this February, Honda had outsold Nissan for 43 consecutive months dating back to June 2011, when supply constraints following the Tohoku earthquake and consequent tsunami hit Honda (and Toyota) but left Nissan untroubled.
Sales of Nissan’s five SUVs and crossovers are up 18 percent in early 2015, and have made up 49 percent of the brand’s total sales through the first two months of 2015. And, despite a flat market for passenger cars, Nissan brand cars were actually up 29 percent in January and February, an improvement of 1,317 sales.
Losses reported by automobile manufacturers at the beginning of the year in a harsh Canadian winter are often made up for with a strong March, April, or May.
