Ford Motor Company U.S. sales of 212,236 vehicles increased 10 percent over a year ago for the best July in eight years. Retail sales of 162,028 vehicles are up 7 percent. Ford Sales analyst, Erich Merkle, says Ford and Lincoln had positive gains last month.

“What’s really fascinating about it is that we if few look at all our vehicle line-ups, we had a positive increase of 8 percent in cars, 15 percent increase in utilities and a 7 percent increase in trucks, so it was really was an across the board we saw increases and it gave us our end result of an increase of 10 percent.”

Ford Fusion set an all-time monthly sales record in July with over 23,900 cars sold, especially the western region of the country.

“Ford Fusion is really doing well for us, it was up 17 percent last month and what’s really fascinating about it, a lot of it came from retail, as our retail, as our sales were up 22 percent nationally. When we look at the West, is where the Fusion really resonates so well, retail sales in the western region of the country were up 24 percent.”

Merkle says another vehicle, the Transit Connect, had a very good month with sales up 42 percent over last year.

“The all-new Transit Connect launched this spring, is, yes for commercial use, but we also have a version of it that’s for retail, for customer use, because we found that a lot of these emerging families folks are looking for great utility, affordable pricing and good fuel economy and that’s exactly what the Transit Connect Wagon delivers.”

Merkle says the Ford F-Series sales were up 5 percent even though Ford offered the lowest incentives of the three largest pickup truck manufacturers, with a lot of our sales coming from retail, commercial and government sales.

“Our retail sales were up 7 and our fleet was up 17, now what’s important about that number is that fleet number was driven by strong performance in commercial and also in our government business. Our commercial business was up 9 percent and our government was up 69 percent. We continue to draw back on our daily rental and we saw sales from our daily rental channels actually down 11 percent. So a lot of our business came in the month of July from retail, commercial and then also a big bump from government particularly as we’re finding strong demand for our Police Interceptor products, such as the Interceptor Utility and the Interceptor Sedan.”

Lincoln as a brand was up 14 percent and the Lincoln MKC sales are expanding, helping to build momentum in that segment.

“Every month it continues to do better, availability continues to get better, as we continue to launch this product and get it out to all of our dealers. But the days to turn on a dealer lot for the MKC right now is 11 days, so when the dealers get them they are gone really fast.”