Lexus, Genesis set US records as Chrysler sits it out

Skeptics have declared for some time that a car in Chrysler’s range could not survive in today’s market, but Genesis, whose first sedan seems to have been directly fashioned on the 300C, set a sales record for 2024. Two major differences are that Genesis has been refreshing its cars, while the 2023 300C dated to 2015; and Genesis added a coupe and a crossover while Chrysler did not.

Hyundai’s electric cars did reasonably well over the year, with the Ioniq 5 reaching 44,000 sales (up from 33,918 in 2022) and the 6 dropping a little  from 12,999 to 12,264. Kia added 21,715 (EV6) and 22,017 (EV9) sales, bringing the total to 99,996 electric car sales in the United States.

Hyundai reached 836,802 U.S. sales in 2024, easily beating any Stellantis marque; Kia was not far behind with 796,488 U.S. sales. Together, even without Genesis, they trounced Stellantis in U.S. sales, leaving the French-Italian-Brazilian-American company in a distant fifth place. (Honda/Acura reported 1,413,213 sales, which also beat Stellantis.)

Stellantis reached 1.3 million U.S. sales (the best selling Stellantis marque, Jeep, only reached 567,725).

Toyota, often the U.S. sales leader, saw 2.3 million sales in the United States, a 4% increase over last year—the same increase as GM and Ford, and enough to put it into the #2 spot after GM’s 2.7 million (globally, Toyota is likely to be the world’s largest automaker again). Since Toyota has relatively few fleet sales, and GM has more brands, Toyota is predicting that it will be the top selling retail brand; it definitely has three best sellers, the Camry returning as the top sedan, the Tacoma as the top compact pickup, and the RAV4 as the best-selling SUV. Lexus had its best year ever in the USA, with 345,669 sales.