Ford beats GM in March sales

USA Today - Ford Motor outsold General Motors in March by more than 6,000 vehicles. It is the first time since February 2010 that Ford topped GM in a month -- and then it was by a mere handful.

Before that, you have to go back to 1998, when GM production was crippled by a strike against component supplier Delphi, then-owned by GM.

Ford said it sold 212,777 vehicles in March, up 19.2% from a year earlier and besting GM's March total of 206,621, up 9.6%.

Ford's strength was from the Ford brand -- and driven by sales of trucks and utility vehicles. Ford says it has only an 11-day supply of the redesigned Explorer SUV, now a crossover instead of a truck-based utility. Industry average is a 60-day supply.

It sold more than 12,000 of the new Explorers in March, up 111%.

Industry tracker and auto-research site Edmunds.com predicts that when the dust settles at the end of the day today, calculations will show that "the February-to-March decline in per-vehicle incentive spending was the steepest ever recorded by Edmunds.com since it started tracking incentives in 2002."

Combined with parts and vehicle shortages and the resulting price hikes because of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the buyers' market might have just ended with a bang.