Setback in March for the car market in Western Europe (EU+EFTA+UK).
Registrations in the month - according to data from Acea, the European manufacturers' association - were 1,383,410, down 2.8% compared to March 2023. In the first three months of the year, a total of 3,395 were sold .049 cars, 4.9% higher than the same period last year.
The share of electric cars in March fell from 13.9% to 13%, while that of hybrids rose from 24.4% to 29%.
Petrol and diesel conquered less than half of the market (47.8%, compared to 51.8% in March 2023).
Stellantis registered 228,740 cars in March, 8.7% less than the same month in 2023. Market share fell from 17.6% to 16.5%. In the quarter the group's registrations were 598,167, 4.2% more than the same period last year with the market share practically unchanged at 17.6% (it was 17.7%).
The pre-crisis levels for the European car market are still far away. This was underlined by the Centro Studi Promotor which highlights the drop of -21.9% in March and 18.1% in the first quarter compared to 2019. "The recovery of the car market in the area which began in August 2022, after a first decline last December (-3.8%) and a recovery in January and February of this year - he explains - was therefore interrupted last month. The causes of the slowdown in March, which among other things affected four of the five major European markets, namely the German one (-6.2%), the Spanish one (-4.7%), the Italian one (-3.7%) and the French one (-1.5%), are indicated by the main European commentators in the weakness of private demand, which appears to be heavily penalized by the price increases of recent years, but also in the slowdown in registrations of electric cars".
In March 2024 - continues the CSP - the registrations of electric cars in the area were in fact 196,411 compared to 220,778 in March 2023, with a drop of 11% also due to significant contractions in Germany (-28.9%) and in Italy (-34.4%). The electric car (BEV) market appears to be increasingly strongly conditioned by the presence and extent of purchase incentives, even if public doubts are beginning to arise regarding the appropriateness of the political choices of the European Union and the United Kingdom on energy transition in the mobility sector and this is also because in the rest of the world incentives for electric cars are envisaged, but at the moment there are no plans to ban internal combustion engines.
As regards Italy in particular, Gian Primo Quagliano, president of the Centro Studi Promotor, maintains that "the demand is certainly being influenced by the wait for the new incentives repeatedly announced by the Government, but not yet operational. And in any case there are strong doubts emerging on the stability of the prices of used electric cars, which do not benefit (or do not yet benefit) from incentives. Added to this is the fact that the electric car "due to its high cost, without generous incentives is currently not within the reach of the market. majority of Italians".