Top-selling cars in 2009 yields some surprises

It’s been a tough year so far for automakers. Many manufacturers are posting large declines in sales compared to last year. However, some individual vehicle models are making strides. Reuters recently put together a list of the top-selling vehicles through October 2009 and it holds some surprises.

The Ford F-150 pickup continues to secure the top spot even with a sales decrease of 23 percent in 2009 over the first ten months of 2008. However, not all pickups held their sales rank; the Dodge Ram drops from the 5th spot to 9th and the Toyota Camry bumped the Chevy Silverado down from 2nd to 3rd.

But the big news is the Ford Fusion. The Fusion was freshened for the 2010 model year and has achieved a number of accolades. The Fusion hybrid is the highest scoring domestic family sedan in Consumer Reports testing. Most versions of the Fusion have above average predicted reliability in our survey data. In sales, it has jumped 10 spots to reach the top 10. Further, it is the only model in the top 10 to show a sales increase this year--15 percent over last year.

Here is the list of the top 10 vehicles in sales and the change from 2008. Also, noteworthy is that all the models are recommended by Consumer Reports.

Click on each model in the chart below to see how they performed in our road test, and see their ratings for reliability, safety, and more.

Rank	Make & model	2009	2008	2008 rank	% change
1	Ford F-Series pickup	334,922	436,022	1	-23.2
2	Toyota Camry	285,069	379,270	3	-24.8
3	Chevrolet Silverado pickup	261,142	402,191	2	-35.1
4	Honda Accord	244,579	333,011	6	-26.6
5	Toyota Corolla	240,755	307,071	4	-21.6
6	Honda Civic	223,751	304,297	8	-26.5
7	Nissan Altima	169,435	241,529	9	-29.8
8	Honda CR-V	158,573	171,193	11	-7.4
9	Dodge Ram pickup	155,467	213,684	5	-27.2
10	Ford Fusion	148,045	128,381	20	+15.3

Also read: Flashy muscle cars are recession's hot ticket.

—Liza Barth

Comments

[Charles]

As much as Ford is trying to be a automobile company, it is just not there, yet. The Fusion plus the Focus do not add up the the F-150. If you add the Escape to the truck mix, it looks really bad.

I think Ford is doing the right thing in diversifying its line up. And with the improvements in quality it may just get there. I hope so. I think the lesson not learned in the auto crash was not that the bigish 3 were not building vehicles that people wanted (just look at sales before the crash). It was that the bigish 3 went for the big profit vehicles (pickups and SUVs), leaving them vulnerable to a fast change in demand. Some old saying about all of your eggs in one basket.

It did help that Toyota and other Asian manufactures have a protected home market for cars. If by some strange and awful set of events pick up and SUV demand had gone way up in the rest of the world, the bigish 3 would have been back to the Big 3.

[Brady Holt]

Interesting to follow the trends on the top-seller list. I've been compiling the top-20 list each month, and the Fusion has consistently been in the lower half recently. I was actually going back to my numbers to double-check the CR placement.

It seems the Fusion was strong early in the year, but has since fallen off relative to the other best-sellers. It was in seventh place over several months, ninth over the first half of the year combined, and now tenth.

(Okay, maybe that's only interesting to me and other people have better things to do than track sales trends.)