Car sales in Europe in March were 0.9% up on last year at 1,757,483 from 1,741,127, according to provisional information released by Acea. Significantly, nine of the countries under revue failed to match or better year ago results, but it was Germany that had the biggest impact with sales falling by 10.4% to 385,000 from 429,896. However, it should be stressed that German figures are estimates and there can sometimes be quite a difference between the actual figures and the estimates. Nevertheless, German sales are now shown to be 8.2% down on last year at 892,496 from 972,497, a deficit of 80,0001 units. That has helped keep growth to date in Europe down to 3.8% at 4,242,308 from 4,088,592.

Western Europe Passenger Car Sales

The number of countries in deficit for the three months to March rose to six with Portugal and Luxembourg joining Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Iceland. All of these countries have been forecast by WAIT to decline for the full year, although the drop in Portugal was a bit sharper than expected. Austria and Spain were also down for the month of March itself and both of those are also forecast by WAIT to show a full year decline come the end of the year.

France is one of the major European markets where we do expect growth for the full year and sales in March were 2.3% up at 211,015 from 206,190, taking the YTD increase to 8.0% at 562,201 from 520,512. Our forecast for the year is for 4.7% growth overall, so the modest rise in March was not unexpected.

The biggest winners to date are the PSA Group with sales up 11.6% YTD to 540,834 from 484,801. Sales for the duo in March were 8.3% up, well ahead of the sector average and market share has now lifted to 12.7% from 11.9%, ahead of the Ford Group who have now been pushed down to the fourth slot in Europe. PSA are obviously being helped by the situation in domestic France, but they are not just relying on that and have made useful gains across most of the European markets. Ford Group, on the other hand, only have Jaguar performing well, and they don’t contribute all that much in reality. Ford, Volvo and Mazda are all behind year to date, which is against part of the theory of these larger groups. It is always hoped that by adding extra legs to the corporate stool that when one member of the group slips, the others might help soften the blow, but no so with Ford.

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The VW Group also saw sales drop YTD, by 0.7% to 763,360 from 68,699, but at least SEAT, Škoda and Audi all helped make the position better than it could have been. All of the other groups have at least one marque that is doing all right and even Rover are still ahead after three months, but the adverse publicity that they have suffered in the past few weeks did drive their March sales into a 1.1% deficit at 41,391 from 41,861. BMW themselves are selling more cars than ever and lifted YTD sales in Europe by 3.7% to 132,829 from 128,115. For the time being Rover still has to be shown as part of the BMW Group, but that is simply for a few weeks more and then it can be expected that Rover sales will dwindle away.

BMW may be listening to an alternative offer for the stricken Rover Group, but they have shown total ruthlessness in recent weeks and are unlikely to listen too hard. They just want to get shot of Rover as quickly as they can, despite having said not very long ago that Rover would be trading in the black by 2002.

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