Mazda was a little slow on reporting its December 2008 and calendar 2008 sales – most automakers reported their figures yesterday - and for the most part, the Japanese automaker followed the downward sales trends hitting the entire industry. A notable exception was the zoom-zoom brand’s mini-minivan, the Mazda5, which posted its best ever sales month in December – 2,884 vehicles, representing a 77.4 percent gain over the same period in 2007.
Year-to-date sales for the Mazda5 were up 60.5 percent to a total of 22,021 vehicles. That compares favorably to last year’s final sales numbers of 13,717.
Introduced for 2006, the Mazda 5 received some very mild updates for 2008, which on their own hardly count for the massive increase in sales.
Otherwise, Mazda’s sales were down across the board. Overall in 2008, Mazda saw a 10.7 percent drop to 263,949 cars sold and December alone saw a 26.8 percent to 17,965 sold vehicles.
Notably, Mazda sold a mere 53 B-Series trucks in December, a 67 percent decrease over the 161 sold during the same period last year.
