"The fleet in circulation in Italy is one of the oldest in Europe, almost a quarter of the fleet in circulation is pre-Euro 4 with an average age of 12.5 years: with the size of the current market around 1.6 million it would take 26 years to replacing them is a rather serious problem both from an environmental and safety point of view."
Andrea Cardinale of Unrae said this during a hearing in the Senate on the state of the automotive industry in Italy.
According to the association of foreign manufacturers, the fleet in circulation has an average of 11 years in France, in Germany 10.1, and in the United Kingdom 8.6.
"This - explained Cardinale - is not a consolidated figure but was created after Lehman Brothers because we started from an average age of 7.9 years in 2009 which did nothing but grow to 12.5 over the period 14 years".
Moreover "the other sectors are in an even worse situation": with an average age of light commercial vehicles of 18 years, of industrial vehicles 14.5 years, of buses 11.6 and of 17 years of trailers and semi-trailers "which even if they do not produce emissions, they impact road safety".
For this reason, the Unrae manager pointed the finger at the fact that "Italy therefore has an old, unsafe and polluting fleet".
For the car market "in the next few years we do not see a return to 2 million registrations, we see 1.8 million but no more": this is the forecast put forward by Andrea Cardinali of Unrae in a hearing in the Senate on the Italian automotive market in to whom he recalled that in 2007 "we had the historical peak of our market, then a collapse after Lehman Brothers and a recovery that brought us back to almost 2 million in 2017, then after covid to 1.6 million last year
" head of the National Union of Foreign Motor Vehicle Representatives then observed that "the registration numbers show that we are still in the big markets but we are still very far from the levels of the past - 1.6 million against the 2.5 million registrations of previous years" .
Cardinali then highlighted the fact that "we are also very far from the production levels we had in the past because we are just over half a million cars compared to, for example, Germany which is at 4.1 million, despite being in sharp decline, Spain about 2 million".
For this reason "if we compare the size of the market with the size of our production capacity it is clear that there is an enormous unsaturated potential between what we produce and what we register in Italy, taking into account that we export 413,000 cars, therefore not all of that we produce in Italy is registered".
In light of this situation, he concluded, "There is ample space to produce more also and not only by the so-called national manufacturer".
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