Column: Three milestones say loads about the auto business

We bring three very noteworthy milestones to your attention in this week’s issue.

First is the milestone that Lithia Motors just skipped past AutoNation to become the biggest auto retailer in America.

That’s a landmark moment.

AutoNation pioneered the notion of a publicly held auto dealer group, and it proved to the business world that car dealers were not merely lucky and crafty. AutoNation made it clear that success in auto selling comes from a systematic and repeatable equation of strategic planning and business fundamentals. And that approach paid off by making AutoNation king of the industry year after year until — well, until now.

Second, please note that the official count is in on U.S. new-vehicle registrations for the full 2022 year, and it reveals that Tesla — the opaque, unpredictable and often second-guessed automaker — is officially a force majeure in the market. Tesla registrations rose 41 percent last year while the industry as a whole declined by 11 percent. Many people have been speculating that Tesla would slip past BMW this year to become the industry’s top-selling luxury brand. In fact, Tesla roared past BMW, and that includes all of BMW’s big-selling gasoline engine products.

Why do we keep making a fuss over registration numbers, as opposed to good old fashioned sales numbers? Simple — things have gotten inconvenient in some sales reporting. Case in point: Tesla. Tesla won’t tell anybody how many vehicles it’s selling in America. But with registrations, there’s no hiding the numbers.

The third milestone comes to us from California.

Again, looking purely at new-vehicle registration data in the nation’s single biggest market, Reporter Laurence Iliff points out that Tesla’s juggernaut may soon do to Toyota — king of California — what Lithia Motors just did to AutoNation. Tesla’s Model 3 just overtook the Toyota Camry, a development that was unthinkable only a couple of years ago. And now Tesla is gunning to upset the rest of it.

Pause to consider that for just a moment.

A respected brand … a time-tested manufacturer… a paragon of a retail organization … Toyota is in real danger of being swamped by the business equivalent of a hurricane. Has Toyota done something wrong? Hardly. But suddenly, its key market is shopping for a different kind of product.

Frankly, each one of these milestones deserves much, much more analysis. And you can count on us to deliver that in the weeks ahead.