In December, after sixteen months of consecutive growth, the Western European car market (EU+EFTA+UK) suffered a decline of 3.8%. The final balance of the year is however still positive, because the overall balance of registrations in 2023 closed at 12,847,481 with an increase of 13.7% on 2022, but compared to 2019 – the year that preceded the pandemic and which remains the first objective to be achieved for the return to normality – there was a drop of 18.7%. “The 2023 result – states Gian Primo Quagliano, president of the Centro Studi Promotor – is essentially due to the demand from companies that have supported the market in the entire area by having the ability to absorb the strong increases in car prices in recent years. The good propensity to purchase cars from companies has in fact compensated for the strong weakness in private demand, discouraged above all by price increases which, to cite one case, that of Italy, grew by 34.3% between 2019 and 2022, and had further increases in 2023.”
However, in some particularly important markets in the area, fleet demand is showing signs of slowing down and to this must be attributed the negative data for December which, among other things, casts a sinister shadow over 2024. And this – continues the Study Center – also because, while the order backlog accumulated at the time of production shortages linked to the difficulties in supplying important components, such as microchips, cables and more, ran out, an order backlog important enough to support the market in 2024 was not reconstituted.
Benefits from incentives
Returning to 2023, in addition to business demand, the market in Western Europe has also benefited from the support of the growth of electric cars driven by very significant incentives in the main markets. Thanks to the incentive drug, registrations of pure electric cars in the area went from 13.9% in 2022 to 15.7% in 2023. The end of the incentives, however, had particularly dramatic effects in some countries and in particular in Germany where , for example, in December the share of electric cars fell from 33.2% in 2022 to 22.6%.
Norway on the podium in the electric
Still on the subject of electric, it should also be said that at the top of the ranking for the share of electric cars is Norway with as many as 82.4% of cars registered in 2023 made up of electric cars. This exceptional environmental merit was supported and financed with powerful incentives also possible because Norway is one of the largest exporters of oil, a product notoriously not at the top of the environmental compatibility charts. At the other end of the ranking for the share of electricity there are several countries where the share does not go beyond 5%. And to be precise, Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Slovakia. As is obvious – concludes the analysis of the Study Center – these are countries whose per capita income is decidedly lower than the European average and, consequently, in these countries access to electric cars at current prices remains very difficult even with generous incentives.
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