Let's touch base again with Cadillac's sales.

This is the last time for the foreseeable future that we will be able to dissect the sales on a month-by-month basis now that GM has switched to quarterly sales reporting. But, let's see what March tells us about the state of the Cadillac brand.

Sales are up in both of the brand's largest markets. US sales were up 12.7% (1633 units) while China saw a massive spike of 45.6% (5638 units). Only the, still humorously named, 'Rest Of World' saw a drop. But it's 11.9% fall only equates to a drop in sales of 258. It may change in the coming years as more crossovers hit the Cadillac stable, but for the time being, I think we can safely say that the US is no longer Cadillac's biggest market and may never be again.

Let's take a deeper dive into the home market to see how things are looking. Excluding the discontinued SRX (which somehow still sold a single, leftover on the lot somewhere, unit in March 2018)...all models were up for the month. XT5 is still the run-away sales champ with well over 6000 units sold in the month. An improvement of 17.2% (908 units). Second best-selling are the variants of the Escalade (total sales between the standard and ESV version) was up 401 units (14%). It is this strength of the utility segment that is larger than just Cadillac that is driving their feverish pace of developing and launching new crossovers/utilities to increase sales.

On the sedan side, it seems we may have finally gotten through most of the drop in sales and now we are comparing apples-to-apples looking at 2017 vs 2018 numbers. Top sales in the sedan segment goes to the XTS with 1735 units sold. This marks an increase from last year of 251 units (16.9%). The other 3 sedans also saw small gains, the represent changes that might have to do with numbers of sales days in the month (28 in March 2018 vs 27 in March 2017). So, all things being equal you would see sales as flat if the increase was not more than about 3.7%. ATS was up 52 units (3.8%) - so flat. CTS was up by 12 units (2.7%) - also flat to a tiny bit down when adjusted for selling days. CT6 was up 26 units (1.4%) - same as the CTS. We would view that as a positive result only because sales of sedans have been dropping so much for so many months.

Stopping the bleeding is a positive move for the brand. Given the imminent release of the XT4 to dealers, I would expect sales to move upward significantly more than the results we have been seeing - though sedans will likely stay flat for the foreseeable future.

March 2018 Cadillac Sales