The Toyota Camry and Corolla sedans each outsold the traditionally top-selling Ford F-series truck in May, a sign of the rapid shift in customers' preferences from trucks and SUVs to small cars that is forcing painful production cuts and plant closures at General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co.
GM said today that its U.S. sales fell 28 percent in May compared with a year earlier, while Ford's sales fell 16 percent and Toyota sales slipped 4 percent.
GM's decline was in part because of strikes at supplier American Axle and Manufacturing Holdings Inc. and several GM plants. GM's truck and SUV sales fell 37 percent, while car sales fell 14 percent. The rapid decline in truck and SUV sales caused GM to announce today that it plans to close four truck and SUV plants by 2010, costing 10,000 jobs.
Ford's U.S. car sales were up 3 percent compared with last May, and it sold more than 30,000 Ford Focus small cars for only the second time in the car's nine-year history. But pickup and SUV sales dropped 26 percent.
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