Honda, GM gain buyers as Toyota curbs U.S. sales

Honda Motor Co. and General Motors Co. probably are gaining buyers as consumers shy away from Toyota Motor Corp. after it halted sales of eight U.S. models covered by a recall, auto researcher Edmunds.com said.

The share of people intending to purchase a Toyota-brand model fell to 10 percent yesterday from 13 percent a day earlier, while GM and Honda each rose 1 percentage point to 15 percent and 12 percent, according to Edmunds.com. The analysis is based on visits to the Edmunds.com Web site.

"It's too soon to tell if GM is getting a special lift in purchase intent, but Toyota is definitely showing a significant drop," David Tompkins, a senior analyst for Santa Monica, California-based Edmunds.com, said today in an interview.

The data offered a glimpse at buyers' leanings on the first sales day after Toyota stopped some sales and idled assembly lines at five North American plants. So-called purchase intent, which tracks the inclination of people poised to buy a vehicle, averaged 15 percent for Toyota last year, Edmunds.com said.

Toyota recalled 2.3 million vehicles last week to fix what U.S. regulators called a "dangerous" accelerator-pedal flaw. The eight models pulled from sale made up 56 percent of Toyota's U.S. deliveries last year, said Koji Endo, managing director of Advanced Research Japan in Tokyo.

Shelving some of Toyota's top-selling models, including the Camry and Corolla, threatens to erode any U.S. gains the automaker might make as demand starts to recover from the industry's 2009 slump, the deepest in 27 years.

'Nuclear Blast'

"For Toyota, this is a nuclear blast of bad news that will continue to have fallout," said Joe Phillippi, president of AutoTrends Consulting in Short Hills, New Jersey. "You can't turn on Fox, CNN or MSNBC without seeing some negative news about the recall. It will be everywhere for a while."

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