Welcome to 2022. With every new year comes the annual onslaught of car companies touting their sales figures. But this year, sales of Chevrolet Impalas hit a figure that General Motors might not want to shout about.
Car sales are a funny thing to browse through. Mostly, they’re just a list of big numbers as the world’s automakers proudly showcase how many vehicles they sold through the year. But every now and then, a surprisingly low figure will pop off the page.
This year, it’s GM’s turn in the limelight as its latest filings show that in the final months of 2021 the firm sold just nine Chevrolet Impalas.
That’s right, in the closing stages of an atrocious year for sales of new and old cars, nine people decided the best way to round out their year was with the acquisition of a factory-fresh Chevrolet Impala.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with the latest Impala, it’s a fine full-sized sedan. But, GM’s faith in the car has been waning for almost four years now.
The firm announced in 2018 that it would cease production of the Impala, and the final model rolled off the production line in February 2020. This means that the nine Impalas that Chevrolet did manage to shift in the final months of the year must be at least 18-months old!
While the models rolled off the line in 2020, the designs for the 10th generation Impala go even further back.
In fact, despite a few low-level refreshes of the trim, the models GM was producing in 2020 trace their origins back to 2012 when the 10th generation Impala premiered at the New York Auto Show. That car first went on sale in 2014.
So now, we’re looking at a 10-year-old design that was being peddled to buyers desperate for a new set of wheels in time for Christmas.
The full-size sedan did go through a few incremental upgrades during its lifespan. For the 2020 model year, the only change GM made to the car was to alter the available trim levels.
But, the last time the model was given even a light refresh was in 2018. That year, Chevrolet tweaked the interior and upped the features that came as standard. The firm now offered daytime running lights, keyless starts and a rear view camera as standard.
Other than that, the design remained basically unchanged from 2014 until the end of the car’s life six years later.
And, it wasn’t just in the closing stages of 2021 that Chevrolet was looking to offload its aging stock of Impalas.
As the chip shortage and the affects of the pandemic hit the car market, a further 741 Chevrolet Impalas were sold in 2021. That’s a dramatic drop off on the 2020 sales for the car, which reached 9,942. Of course, the fact that the car was still being built that year surely helped.
Does this mean that Chevrolet has finally sold the last of its aging Impala stock? Or, are dealers across the U.S. looking for unsuspecting buyers to offload their final few vehicles onto?
We did reach out to GM to try and uncover how many Impalas could still be lurking on car lots, but in typical automaker fashion a representative of the firm said: “We don’t share inventory figures for individual product lines”.