U.S. Automobile Production Figures

Automobile experimentation and design in the US started a few years after Carl Benz patented and produced his original gasoline-powered motor car in 1886, and a handful of companies were producing them in the US by the turn of the century. The table below shows the annual unit volumes for the top US producers in each year from 1899 to 2000. The data appear to be stated in "model years", rather than calendar years; as model-years vary by brand and vintage, the data are not exactly comparable over time. There are several cases where a producer disappears from the list for a year; it is not clear whether this is because that producer's volumes dropped dramatically (for example, from an extended labor strike) or the data is simply missing in the original sources.

The numbers below represent passenger vehicles made and sold in the US by US-owned companies. Foreign-owned brands with production in the US for US consumption (such as Volkswagen or Honda) are excluded. Almost certainly, "fleet vehicles" are included, but trucks and imported brands are excluded. "Rebadged" imported models (such as the Metropolitan or several GM models after the 1980s) are not consistently reported in these numbers, and the same goes for US models produced in Canadian plants (such as Dodge's factory in Windsor, Ontario, or Studebaker's factory in Hamilton, Ontario.

Attached to this page is an Excel spreadsheet that organizes the data below into a standard annual grid format. The spreadsheet was populated (and for some minor brands, combined) from the data below, but excludes minor vendors (those achieving well below 1% market share). The gaps in the spreadsheet data should be updated from authoritative data by users.