Car buyers display brand loyalties

When Ron and Sherry Dick's kids were younger, the family's jumbo-size Suburban was a perfect fit. But an empty nest and 200,000 miles later, the 23-year-old truck had become a rusty embarrassment.

“Here's a little 5-foot-2 lady driving a big Suburban around town,” Ron Dick said.

This summer, the Omaha couple took advantage of the Cash for Clunkers car-buying stimulus program to trade in their 1986 Suburban for a two-passenger 2009 Smart car.

They asked the salesman at Performance Smart Center of La Vista take a picture of the two vehicles, nose to nose and side by side. They laughed about how much they had downsized with their upgrade.

While not everyone made such a dramatic change, more than 14,000 people in Nebraska and Iowa used the $3 billion federal program over the summer. The federal program was designed to boost the struggling auto industry and steer Americans to more fuel-efficient vehicles.

The World-Herald analyzed a federal database of all 677,081 U.S. Cash for Clunkers deals.

In some ways, the newspaper found, the Midlands transactions mirrored the rest of the country. But in other ways, the choices in Iowa and Nebraska were vastly different from those in other regions.

For example, new Toyotas were the top choice in nearly two-thirds of the states. But Nebraskans preferred Fords most, while Iowans liked Chevys.

The top vehicles purchased in Nebraska were trucks: the Ford F-150 and the Chevrolet Silverado. In Iowa, they ranked in the top three.

“You can't get much hay in a mid-size car,” said Loy Todd, president of the Nebraska New Car & Truck Dealers Association.

Nationwide, however, the F-150 and the Silverado barely cracked the top 10.

And when it came to fuel-sipping cars such as the Toyota Prius, people in California bought that hybrid at four times the rate in Nebraska.

“I think you have a lot of farmers, ranchers, construction types who wanted pickups,” said Paul Cech, chief financial officer for the Woodhouse group of auto dealerships. “I think the Midwest is still a domestic (market).”

Cech should know. His company's dealership in Blair ranks second in the nation in overall Ford sales, and it did well in the clunkers program, too. The Blair location was the top dealer in Nebraska, with 505 total sales — nearly one-tenth of all vehicles sold under the program in the state.

“It was a busy time,” Cech said. “I think the uncertainty of the program — how long it was going to last — sent a lot of buyers into the market in a short period of time.”

The monthlong program provided discounts of $3,500 or $4,500 to vehicle buyers whose trade-ins and new purchases met certain requirements. It was popular with auto dealers and consumers, who used up the money in the program far faster than expected.

Critics, however, noted that the rules allowed deals that offered minimal fuel savings and suggested that plenty of used fuel-efficient vehicles were already on the market.

Despite strong interest in new trucks, many Midlands buyers chose smaller cars.

At Edwards Subaru Hyundai in Council Bluffs, general manager Troy Ratigan saw good sales for cars such as the Hyundai Elantra.

“We had an awful lot of people interested,” said Ratigan, whose dealership was western Iowa's top Cash for Clunkers seller.

If you look only at cars, the Ford Focus was the top seller in both Nebraska and Iowa. It was the fourth-most-popular car nationwide.

While Ford sold nearly 90,000 vehicles nationwide, more than twice that number were traded in. In general, people who took part in the program shifted their preferences from domestic to foreign manufacturers.

Under Cash for Clunkers, Toyota and other Asian automakers had the largest net gains in vehicles on the road — selling more new vehicles than were traded in. The five makes with the biggest net losses, both in the Midlands and nationwide: Ford, Jeep, Dodge, Chevrolet and GMC.

Across the country, the typical buyer wound up with a new vehicle that gets nine more miles per gallon than the buyer's clunker. Nebraska and Iowa buyers matched that gain, although their truck-heavy trades look somewhat worse than the nation on other gas mileage comparisons.

Ron and Sherry Dick tripled their gas mileage from 12 mpg to 36. The couple had looked at other small cars but settled on the Smart, which they first saw years ago in Europe.

Ironically, while Ron Dick thought the giant Suburban was too big for his wife, it turns out she's now driving the couple's 1996 Buick Century.

Her husband's the one driving the tiny Smart car. And he's 6-foot-4.

“I love it,” he said. “I'm just overjoyed with it.”

Contact the writer:

444-1114, paul.goodsell@owh.com

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