Car sales down in L.A.

Expect a 4.8 percent drop in Southern California car sales this year, according to a report by the Southland Motor Car Dealers Association. For the first six months of 2006, Honda, BMW, Lexus, Mitsubishi, Suzuki and Hummer did the best in the percent increase of registrations from a year ago (the Hummer sounds like a surprise, but remember that the actual number of registrations for the first half of the year is a little over 300, compared with Honda, which had nearly 8,000). Top seller Toyota lost a little ground, though it still has a 14 percent lead in market share over Honda. At the bottom of the list in percentage change from last year were Cadillac, Ford, GMC, Nissan and Hyundai. Some of these comparisons from 2005 are a little misleading because the U.S. automakers had all those employee discount plans last year. So lots of folks who might have bought this year bought last year instead.

Gasoline update: The weekly government survey released this afternoon showed that the average gallon of self-serve regular is $3.13, down from $3.19 last week. Barring something unexpected, prices should keep falling over the next few weeks because the summer vacation season is about over, which means that demand will be dropping. The basic explanation for what’s going on is that oil prices have fallen quite a bit – they’re around $70 a barrel – and there’s also plenty of gasoline available.