US car sales fall by 34 percent in April

Hard on the heels of Chrysler's bankruptcy filing and with GM struggling to avoid a similar fate, April car sale figures released on Saturday showed a further slide, dropping 34% from a year earlier.Bad news at Chrysler and General Motors took a bite out of US auto sales that fell 34 percent in April as consumers shied away from dealerships amid growing economic uncertainty. The news of Chrysler's bankruptcy on Thursday came too late in the month to have a major impact on sales.But school closings as a result of swine flu and the media's focus on the ongoing problems in the automotive industry had "a little bit of a CNN effect" on overall industry sales, said Ford analyst George Pipas."There are indications in the economy several leading indicators, that suggest that we are near or at bottom in auto sales, and also the economy's contraction is beginning to subside," Pipas said. Ford sales fell 32 percent to 134,401 in April and were down 40 percent for the year to date at 458,772.But Ford -- which unlike GM and Chrysler has not needed government aid to survive a collapse in auto sales -- celebrated the fact that it has managed to increase its share of the US market for six out of the past seven months.