New car sales in Germany, France, Italy and Spain fell by between around 3% and 20% year on year according to media reports citing local industry association data.
Reuters, citing preliminary data from import car brand association VDIK, said German sales declined by 4.7% in August.
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The association added new car registrations fell to around 226,500 in August, bringing the cumulative total over the first eight months of the year to 2.1m, off 0.6% for the same period in 2011.
Reuters reported French sales tumbled 11% to 96,115 cars in August, for a 10th monthly decline while Italian sales dropped about 20%, Fiat chief executive Sergio Marchionne said.
That was better than the 25% drop forecast on Friday by Federauto, the car dealers’ trade group whose data does not include cars purchased by dealers but yet to be sold to the public.
Marchionne reportedly said car sales in the United States and Brazil, two of Fiat’s main markets, are going “really well.”
Spanish car sales – unusually – rose 3.4% because customers rushed to complete purchases and beat a sales tax rise in September. Analysts said the downtrend would likely resume this month.
Industry group ANFAC told Reuters 10,000 private customers brought forward purchases of cars before the tax rise. Yet the overall trend was down, with a drop of 8.5% in sales in the first eight months of the year, and worse expected to come.
“The last part of the year, especially September and October are going to be a disaster. We are going to see a sharp fall unless sellers hold the sector up by making aggressive offers,” a spokesman for car distributors’ association Faconauto told the news agency.
ANFAC said 520,216 cars were sold in the first eight months of the year and forecast no more than 700,000 would be sold in the full year.
The Renault brand saw its domestic registrations plummet 30% even as low-cost Dacia booked a 21% gain on runaway sales of its no-frills Sandero subcompact and Duster SUV models.
PSA Peugeot Citroen’s domestic sales fell in step with the local market’s 11% drop, the reports noted.
Ford, which recently doubled its full-year European loss forecast to US$1bn, saw August sales plunge 17% in France and 22% in Spain.
French annualised sales are down about 20 per cent from their 2010 peak, compared with 35% for Italy and Spain, “indicating the potential for further falls in France”, Credit Suisse analyst David Arnold said in a note.
However, Hyundai Motor affiliate Kia was among lower-cost brands that recorded strong increases. Along with Hyundai, Kia continued to build on a combined European market share that reached 5.9% in the first half of 2012.
“We still do not see any signs of recovery on the horizon,” Flavien Neuvy, head of French auto-industry think tank Cetelem, said.
Volkswagen brand sales fell 7.4% in France but rose 8.7% in Spain, outperforming both markets.
The VW group’s Audi luxury car division achieved gains of 8.4% in France and 9.7% in Spain while BMW volume also rose in both markets.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, new car registrations were down 12.15% so far this year, according to data from the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) cited by the Irish Times.
SIMI said 74,158 new registrations were made for the year so far to the end of August, with Toyota the top brand (9,381 registrations), just three new cars ahead of Volkswagen (9,378). Ford was third with 8,021.
VW has claimed that, if personally imported new cars are taken out of the registration data, its brand was number one which would be the first time it has topped the Irish new car market for over 20 years, the paper added.
A surge in registrations in the last three days of the month accounted for 38% of VW’s August registrations, the report noted.
At Toyota, a similar trend in the last three days accounted for 39% of the brand’s August registrations.
