[bonestamp2]

Ya, it is kind of weird because the Dealer is actually the OEM's customer. But they measure in sales to the consumer, which is a more useful number because:

1. Dealers will order certain high demand vehicles all day long when they are allowed to do so ("allocations") even though they don't have specific consumers in mind to buy them.

2. When new models become available they will also order a bunch of that new model.

3. They will order some random vehicles to look nice in their showroom or on the lot. Fun example: I recently drove by a Porsche dealership that had a bunch of Macan's lined up out front -- one in each color!

So, sales to the consumer is more useful because it's the only way to measure actual consumer demand. This is also why you sometimes see a model that hasn't been manufactured for several years show up in these new car sales reports... they were sitting on a lot unsold for that long.

You can also find numbers for how many of each model they've manufactured each month, which is useful for different reasons of course, and sometimes they sit on the manufacturer's lot for weeks or months before they're delivered to dealers. We saw this coming out of the pandemic when there weren't enough trains to transport the cars (most cars leave the plant on a train).