September worst auto sales month since 1993

updated 8:46 p.m. ET Oct. 1, 2008

DETROIT - U.S. auto sales dropped below 1 million last month for the first time in more than 15 years as some consumers struggled to get financing and others were frightened away from showrooms by bank failures and turmoil on Wall Street.

Americans bought 964,873 vehicles in September, the lowest sales figure since February 1993, according to Autodata Corp. and the Edmunds.com automotive Web site. Sales fell 27 percent compared with September 2007, with every major brand but General Motors Corp. reporting drops of at least 24 percent.

“It was tantamount, really, to a natural disaster,” said George Pipas, top sales analyst for Ford Motor Co., which saw sales slide 34 percent, its worst month of the year.

GM, buoyed by its offer of employee pricing on most of its models, said Wednesday that it sold 16 percent fewer vehicles than it did a year earlier. But executives were happy with the performance given the market conditions, which nearly all automakers said were influenced by tighter credit standards knocking buyers from the market.

“A few years ago I’d have jumped out the window with these numbers, and we’re on the 39th floor here,” Mark LaNeve, GM’s vice president of North American sales, said in a conference call from the automaker’s downtown Detroit headquarters.

Even Toyota Motor Corp., whose fuel-efficient offerings led to strong sales earlier this year, saw a decline of 32 percent, with the top Japanese automaker blaming the drop on the overall economic conditions.

Many dealers have said customers are having an increasingly hard time qualifying for loans to buy autos, as banks have restricted lending because of widespread mortgage defaults that led to disruptions in the financial markets. Plus, several automakers’ finance arms have limited or discontinued leasing.

Unlike other automakers, Toyota officials said its finance arm has a strong ability to provide credit, so that did not cause the sales decline. But a lack of consumer confidence did, they said, especially late in the month.

“The last 10 days of the month are typically the best, and we saw the traffic steadily decline to extremely low levels in the last couple of days,” said Bob Carter, group vice president and general manager of Toyota Division in the U.S.

“I think consumers are waiting on the sidelines to rebuild some confidence and get back out into the market,” he said.

At Chrysler LLC, sales tumbled 33 percent for the month, while even Honda Motor Co., one of the few automakers that had posted sales growth through August, reported a 24 percent drop.

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