Feb. 4--Retail sales of new cars and trucks might have finally hit bottom in January, despite an industrywide sales decline of 37.1% compared with the same month a year ago, automakers said Tuesday.

U.S. consumers bought just 656,976 new vehicles last month. That equates to a seasonally adjusted annual selling rate, or SAAR, of just 9.57 million cars and trucks -- the lowest rate the industry has experienced since June 1982, according to Autodata Corp.

The SAAR indicates what sales would total for the whole year if demand remained constant over 12 months, adjusting for seasonal factors. It's an easy reference to compare how the market is performing month to month. For the past decade or so, the SAAR usually has ranged between 14 million and 17 million vehicles. Since December 2007, the monthly SAAR has been in decline.

"This is not real. This is artificially low," said Jesse Toprak, executive director of industry analysis for Edmunds.com, who stressed that the industry might not recover without some sort of external stimulus.

In January, sales declined 54.8% for Chrysler, 48.9% for General Motors Corp. and 40.3% for Ford Motor Co. Asian automakers suffered, too. Sales declined 31.7% at Toyota, 29.7% for Nissan and 27.9% for Honda.

January's dismal sales results came just as the U.S. Senate amended the $900-billion economic stimulus bill that would encourage consumers to buy a new car. The proposed addition would create a tax deduction for the interest on a new-vehicle loan. The average benefit of that proposal would be about $1,500 on a $25,000 vehicle, depending on state taxes.

Despite the industrywide declines, auto company executives see signs of stabilization because most of the declines came in fleet sales to rental car customers and commercial customers -- not individual consumers in dealer showrooms, known as retail sales.

"It's the fourth month in a row we have seen stability," Mike DiGiovanni, GM's executive director of global market and industry analysis, said of retail sales.

GM, for example, lost 4.5 percentage points of U.S. market share. Its retail sales declined 38%. But its fleet sales declined even more, 80%.

Fleet sales also declined 80% at Chrysler and 65% at Ford.

Executives at GM and Ford said the temporary shutdown of assembly plants in January led huge declines in fleet sales, but CNW Marketing Research in Bandon, Ore., also said the slowdown in the economy is leading businesses to curtail their fleet orders. The research firm said the industry can expect to sell 1.3 million fewer vehicles to fleet customers in 2009, or a total of about 3.55 million vehicles.