Toyota loses number one spot for car owner loyalty??
Honda has overtaken Toyota as the brand that does the best job of retaining US customers.
64.7 percent of Honda owners replace their vehicles with another Honda, according to the 2008 Customer Retention Study by J.D. Power and Associates.
Toyota, the 2007 winner, came second at 63.2 percent, followed by Lexus, Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Five Japanese brands were among the 11 brands above the average industry score of 48 percent. Ford, Chevrolet and Cadillac were the three US brands above average. The study measures the percentage of U.S. new-vehicle buyers and lessees who replaced a vehicle with another of the same brand from November of 2007 through May 2008.
One compensation for Toyota is that, for the second consecutive year, it has beaten General Motors Corp.’s Chevrolet and Ford as the top seller in the US.
Before 2004, Ford had been the top-selling US brand for 18 years, and Ford and Chevrolet have jockeyed for the top spot since then. But both domestic brands lost out last year when Toyota topped Chevrolet by 41,296 vehicles in 2007, selling 2.3 million vehicles.
Through November 2008, Toyota sold 1.8 million cars, 185,200 more vehicles than Chevrolet.