New car sales figures - What they don't tell you

[andyalan10]

OK so I'm a numbers nerd. So despite not even living in the UK, or being in the market for a new car, I look at the SMMT numbers every month.

Most of the press take a small part of the SMMT statement and do no further analysis, so it's always interesting to see what is not being said.

In February:-

BEV market share fell YoY
PHEV sales flat, market share well down (market was up 26%)
Fleet sales up massively, private much less so
BMW and Mercedes have given up 2-3% of the market.
Audi, along with the rest of the VAG group up substantially.

So I'm with Carlos Tavares (Mr Stellantis), by the end of the year he expects heavy marketing to be back, and discounting.

[Nickbrapp]

Surely a fair bit will be people waiting to pick up their new cars till March to get it on a 23 plate, which explains higher fleet registrations since they don’t care about the reg?

[andyalan10]

I agree you'd expect fleet sales to make up a higher proportion of February sales than March, for example.

But the change is February 2023 vs February 2022 - fleet sales plus 46%, privates sales plus 6%.

My suspicion is that VAG has been the first to blink in the "we'll just sell fewer cars at higher prices from now on" game.

[Ninja59]

I think for private sales worse is to come, how long some private buyers may have waited could have been before any real increases in interest rates kicked in....