DETROIT — Summer promotions and easier credit lured shoppers back to car buying last month, a relief to an industry worried about June's sales slowdown.

Every major automaker except for Ford and Daimler said their July sales topped those in June. The biggest monthly sales gains were posted by Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Subaru and Kia.

The industry sold just more than 1 million cars and light trucks in July. That's 6.6 percent higher than in June, when worries were growing that the economic recovery might be faltering. Sales also were 5.1 percent higher than in July 2009, a year where sales fell to a 30-year low.

Pickup trucks and luxury cars were big sellers. Ford said July was the first month in two and a half years it sold more than 50,000 F-150s. Sales of the Toyota Tundra full-size pickup jumped 40 percent over last July. The newly redesigned Jeep Grand Cherokee also saw sales jump.

Cadillac's SRX crossover, also redesigned this year, saw surging sales — up 750 percent over last July — and Acura sales were 45 percent higher.

Jesse Toprak, vice president of industry trends and analysis at the car pricing website TrueCar.com, said growth in truck and luxury sales is a positive sign since buyers are most likely to hold off purchases in those segments when times are tough.

Toprak said there is a great deal of pent-up demand in the market now. He expects that to translate into sales gains in the last half of the year, even if the economy hasn't fully recovered.

Expressed as an annual rate, July sales were at a pace of 11.98 million. That's higher than last year's total sales of 10.4 million, but still far from the peak sales of 16.9 million in 2005.