Latest figures from French auto manufacturers show a sharp rise in January registrations, although forecasts for the second half of 2010 were less easy to predict.
Personal car plate orders rose 14% to 171,000 last month, according to raw data from the Comite des Constructeurs Francais d’Automobiles (CCFA), but French economic difficulties were reflected in a precipitous fall of 42% in heavy vehicle sales of more than 5t.
Go deeper with GlobalData
Discover B2B Marketing That Performs
Combine business intelligence and editorial excellence to reach engaged professionals across 36 leading media platforms.
Light commercial vehicle registrations of less than 5t however, increased 7.7% to almost 31,000 compared to January 2009.
“In the first quarter of 2010 we think we will have good figures but after [that] we have no real forecast for the second half,” a CCFA spokesman told just-auto.
“The lorry market has gone down since last year, this reflects really the problems of road transport and there is less business being traded.”
In common with several European countries, France has benefited from a scrappage scheme stimulus, but also from an ecological bonus depending on CO2 emitted per kilometre.
New car buyers will benefit from EUR700 (US$980) in scrappage for the first six months of this year compared to EUR1,000 for trading in cars of more than 10 years old and which emitted less than 160g/km in 2009.
The last six months of 2010 will allow buyers to benefit from a EUR500 incentive and EUR300 next year. France has committed EUR240m to the scrappage scheme for 2010 with the ministry of ecology predicting this will finance some 400,000 cars.
However, the CCFA says the industry was keen to avoid what apparently were errors in a previous scrappage scheme in France at the end of the 1990s, when the offer abruptly came to a halt.
“We absolutely want to avoid what happened at the end of the 1990s, with a previous government when scrappage was completely stopped,” said the CCFA spokesman.
“From spring last year we said we don’t want to come brutally out of scrappage.”
The spokesman noted the difficulty of predicting any firm level of recovery given the ongoing fragility of the French economy: “We can’t see how the second half of the year will go,” he said.
And the CCFA added it is now easier to collate information on both new and used cars since the introduction of the new Système d’Immatriculation des Véhicules (SIV), which unlike the previous registration system, now means the same plate will remain with the car from production to destruction.
The new plates – introduced to track cars more easily and avoid fraud – will be formed of seven alphanumeric characters. However, in a to concession buyers that the CCFA spokesman describes as “totally French,” purchasers will be able to add their individual departement numbers and logos.
