Germany hasn’t lost its newfound appetite for new cars. July registrations weren’t quite up by 40 percent as they were in June and in May. But a plus of 29.5 percent compared to the same month in the prior period is nothing to sneeze at. Still powered by Abrwackprämie, the trend to smaller cars continues its trajectory. Sales of Mini-sized cars rose 144.1 percent, subcompacts grew 67.5 percent. Anything larger: Vergiss es. Who’s the big winner?
It’s Sergio Marchionne and his Fiat brand stable: For the year, Alfa is up 101.2 percent, Fiat is up 105.5 percent. Good omen for an Opel-Magna-GAZ linkup: Russian Lada is up 141.2 percent for the year. The big losers: Chrysler, GM and SAAB.
Details (in German, but the numbers speak for themselves) are again provided by the ever so efficient Kraftfahrtbundesamt, free for your downloading pleasure.
German car exports (usually half of Germany’s production) are coming back from the dead also. Exports in July are only 12 percent below the same month in 2008, the order books are filling up slowly, pointing towards a single digit decline in August and a turn-around in fall.
The corrected link:
http://www.kba.de/cln_016/nn_124384/DE/Presse/PressemitteilungenStatistiken/Fahrzeugzulassungen/n__07__09__pdf,templateId=raw,property=publicationFile.pdf/n_07_09_pdf.pdf
Alfa’s and Lada’s market shares are so tiny that they’re not statistically significant. But Fiat did well, as did Opel, Peugeot, Seat and Skoda.
BMW/Mini and Mercedes are slipping down the charts: they both stand at 6.6% market share now, behind Renault and barely ahead of Audi.
th009: Thanks for the heads-up. Link fixed. Had to do it in HTML source, the TTAC code is a bit uncooperative today….
You are welcome — thanks for great content as always, Bertel!
Down here, the “temporary” tax break is getting to look as though it’s turning permanent. Good news for the new car market then, and July was a record month.
Fiat is still the leader, opening up a bit more from the second place. GM fallling, Ford, Renault, Peugeot, Toyota stable. Oh and Honda is gaining market share, too.
Record month, record growth, looks like yet another record year. Although it’s not spectacular, but in these times, a 5% rate of growth in sales is to be appreciated.
Brazil has some crazy tributary policy. A $50K dollar BMW can be had in Brazilian soil only if you pay some $135K (yes, one hundred and thirty five THOUSAND dollars). Needless to say over 100% is tax.
That is a major reason why everything sold in Brazil with four wheels is locally produced, which is tragic since the local industry has 1950s technology. The result are millions of real death traps running around the streets with the reliability of the Challenger Shuttle and 3 years lifespan or 30K miles, whichever comes first.
Anything to change this status quo will be very good indeed.
“Fiat is up 105.5 percent.”
Germans buy Fiats? Wow, Italian cars must have gotten better. I still remember them as unreliable buzz boxes with ergonomics intended for gorillas with unusually short legs and unusually long arms.
Germans have a new fangled love affair with cars cheaper than their domestics, including those from Italy, and even former com-bloc nations.
Wow. If that doesn’t say bad economy, nothing does.
Was auch immer geschah deutschem Stolz?
I am driving since 47 years and I have never been left down by Fiat /Lancia etcc (my son & brother twice each with Passat and A4)
Regretfully now the good habit of
giving ample space to the driver and an ergonomic seat is not there on some model(New Punto…).But certainly, most of them are more comfy then BMW1/3/5 and A3/4 with all the price they charge and inspite of the good engines they have.
Result:before buying my latest car 2008, I have tried them all (cat 2000cc TD), and finally found the latest Croma the most satisfactory(cms160 high!)
and long distance traveler for a family at a
reasonable price.
Fiat and Alfa both just rolled out new cool small cars. The Fiat 500 and the Alfa Romeo MiTo are probably the big winners, with the Grande Punto trailing. And they’re not really that bad. They’re fun and easy to drive and cheap. Being Italian, they’ll still break, but that’s pretty much what cars do. Unless you’re willing to live with buying a Toyota.