October vehicle tags tally at 10,059

LITTLE ROCK — More than 10,000 new vehicles were registered in Arkansas last month, the most registrations in the state since May, a Kentucky automotive research firm said Thursday.

There were 10,059 new vehicle registrations last month, said Cross-Sell of Lexington, Ky., which provides market analysis for the automotive industry. That is about 10 percent more than the 9,132 new vehicles registered in the state in October last year.

There were 10,173 new vehicle registrations in May, the only other month with more than 10,000 registrations since totals were first supplied by Cross-Sell in June 2008.

Michael Pakko, chief economist at the Institute for Economic Advancement at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, speculated that the long period of big growth in registrations may be leveling off. In recent months, titles have twice jumped by 50 percent and once by more than 30 percent.

“We are still seeing strong gains,” Pakko said. “That’s a healthy sign for dealers.”

Auto manufacturers saw large declines in sales during the recession in 2008 and 2009, so they had a long way to go to recover, Pakko said.

The change in model years contributed to the surge in titles in October, said Dennis Jungmeyer, president of the Arkansas Automobile Dealers Association.

“With the model changeover, there were some great rebates and incentives on 2012 and 2013 models, which really spiked the market a little bit,” Jungmeyer said.

Some of those incentives, which expired last month, included rebates as high as $4,500 on the 2012 Chevrolet Avalanche and $2,000 on the 2013 Chevrolet Impala or GMC Sierra; interest rates as low as 0.9 percent on several 2013 Honda models; and rebates of $2,500 on the 2012 Kia Sedona, Automotive News said.

Through October of this year, there have been 81,629 new vehicles registered in the state, an 18 percent climb compared with the first 10 months of last year when slightly more than 69,000 new vehicles were titled.

Last month, there were more than 14,700 used vehicles titled through sales by auto dealers, up slightly from about 14,500 used vehicles registered in October 2011. In addition, about 23,500 used vehicles were registered as private-party transactions, compared with about 25,750 in October 2011.

Vehicle title totals aren’t a precise comparison of monthto-month vehicle sales because Arkansans are given 30 days to register cars or trucks after purchasing them. So October titles represent, for the most part, actual sales in September. State agencies do not provide the number of automobile sales in Arkansas each month.

Nationally, auto sales rose 7 percent last month compared with October 2011, Automotive News reported. The seasonally adjusted annualized sales dropped to 14.3 million from 14.9 million in September, with the decline primarily attributed to Hurricane Sandy, Automotive News said.