GM Only Bright Spot in June Car Sales With Dramatic 26 Percent Increase, Forecasts Edmunds.com

SANTA MONICA, Calif., June 27 -- This month's car sales will top 1.57 million units, a 9.4 percent increase over June 2004 (or 5.2 percent when adjusted for the one extra selling day this year), according to Edmunds.com, the premier online resource for automotive information.

The majority of the increase in June will come from General Motors. GM's Employee Discount promotion boosted the automaker's sales by a dramatic 26 percent compared to June 2004 (or 21 percent when adjusted for the number of selling days). Edmunds.com projects that GM will sell more than 475,000 units in June and increase its U.S. market share to over 30 percent. In fact, GM is predicted to be the only major automaker to post a market share gain this month. GM's May 2005 market share was 25.4 percent.

"GM's promotion succeeded not only in generating showroom traffic by creating a sense of urgency for the consumers, but also resulted in a significant market share gain -- which is exactly what GM and its dealers needed after several months of declines," observed Jesse Toprak, Edmunds.com Senior Analyst. "The one-price-shopping aspect of the program resulted in a promotion that made car shopping less stressful and simple. We expect GM to extend this promotion at least until the end of July."

Edmunds.com's current research and proprietary statistical models also predict that Chrysler will sell 211,000 units in June, resulting in a market share of 13.4 percent, down from 14.3 percent in May. Ford is predicted to sell 270,000 in June; this would cause Ford's market share to slip to 17.2 percent in June, down from 17.6 percent last month.

Among Japanese automakers, Nissan is predicted to sell more than 99,000 units in June. Nissan's market share is expected to remain in its May level, which was 6.3 percent. Toyota is expected to sell 193,000 units, which would result in the automaker losing market share -- from 13.5 percent in May to 12.3 percent in June. Honda is predicted to sell 121,000 units and also lose market share -- from 8.2 percent in May to 7.7 percent in June.

About Edmunds.com, Inc. (www.edmunds.com)

Edmunds.com is the premier online resource for automotive information. Its comprehensive set of data, tools and services, including Edmunds.com True Market Value(R) pricing, is generated by Edmunds.com Information Solutions and is licensed to third parties. For example, the company supplies content for the auto sections of NYTimes.com, AOL, About.com and IGN.com, provides weekly data to Automotive News and delivers monthly data reports to Wall Street analysts. Edmunds.com also publishes a high-speed, on-screen car magazine called Inside Line available free at www.insideline.com. Edmunds.com was named "best car research" site by Forbes ASAP, has been selected by consumers as the "most useful Web site" according to every J.D. Power and Associates New Autoshopper.com Study(SM) and was ranked first in the Survey of Car-Shopping Web Sites as reported by The Wall Street Journal. The company is headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif. and maintains a satellite office outside Detroit.