My analysis of the 2023 UK car sales data just released

[soupdragon1]

Not sure whether this should be the general gassing section or car buying. For the love of god, I don't want to be doing any more 'car buying' as I bought 3 cars in 2023 and swore I was done!!

So we'll go with General gassing but move if necessary Mod team

I'll start with link to data for anyone that wants to confirm my sources:

https://www.smmt.co.uk/vehicle-data/car-registrati...

I've taken some of this data, and sorted into other bits of meaningful commentary that will be more suited to some of the types of discussions we've been having on great threads such as 'EV's....no one wants them!' Well, big shout out to that thread creator, Leicesterdave, I think the data shows he was right!!

So here is some data and interpretation. I've got an excel sheet where I sorted, filtered etc so that we could have some better insight to help make some of the data a bit more meaningful. I'll drop that in later in another post. I'll just go with raw commentary for now and then put some screenshots in later this evening. So here goes:

UK 2023 Car Market summary

UK car market has officially shaken off the Covid impact and total UK car sales grew by 17.9%, from 1.61m cars to 1.9m cars

Private buyers were 43% of the market, with 57% being fleet and business

• EV market had dropped to approx 20% private buyers, 80% fleet and business

With EV subsidies removed for private purchases in the UK, but still generous for fleet and business, we can see a huge disconnect with EV sentiment. Private buyers make up 43% of the market, but only 8.6% are EV sales (43% x 20%)
(EV market share is 16.5%, of which 20% are private buyers so 3.3% private, 13.3% subsidised business/fleet)

UK EV market share YOY has DROPPED from 16.6% to 16.5%

Total market share:

Petrol 40.7%
Hybrids 39%
EV's 16.5%
Diesel 3.8%

Of course the hybrid sales will have fuel also, but to show how far diesel has fallen, mild hybrid diesels are still only 3.4% of the market, whereas mild hybrid petrols are 14.7% of the market. Diesel not getting much love at all from the British Public! Add the diesel only and diesel mild hybrid together, we're still not even close to 10%

In terms of year on year movement, petrol, diesel and EV's have all lost market share, with Hybrids the only area of market share growth in the UK
Hybrid YOY growth points to hybrid cars being the most popular vehicle type in the UK in 2024, overtaking petrol only vehicles perhaps?

The EV market had largely been expected to grow every year, so why is it going backwards?

It’s a tough question to answer, but the data shows that people were more interested in hybrid technology in 2023, the only growth area

So lets look at some cars and manufacturers now, to see how they are doing:

The top 7 manufacturers for vehicle sales remain the same year on year, VW, Ford, Audi, BMW, Toyota, Kia and Vauxhall, in that order
with Nissan taking 8th place from Mercedes, who now drop to 9th, and Hyundai now occupy 10th spot

So what about the worlds most valuable car maker, Tesla, where are they!?

They never made the top 10 in 2022, and they're even further away now. Tesla were 11th in the league in 2022 and have now dropped to 16th, just ahead of Mini

Tesla market share was 3.4% in 2022, but has now dropped to 2.6%, which is a 24% decline
To put that 2.6% market share in perspective, the Ford Puma crossover has a bigger market share than all Tesla cars combined in the UK
Yes, just 1 car variant from Ford, the Puma, has more market share than the worlds most valuable car maker. Its a crazy world we live in!

The only good news for Tesla is that the Model Y is the 5th best selling car in the UK, and the most popular EV overall

• albeit, that 80% of EV sales are subsidised by the UK taxpayer as mentioned earlier

Other observations:

Vw brand are No1 in the UK for overall car sales, and VW Group (inc Audi etc) are No1 for EV sales too

We already mentioned Mercedes and Tesla going backwards, but who is moving up?
Nissan, Skoda, MG and Land Rover are notables in moving up the league table in 2023

So what about the great British Marques?

Are we even allowed to call MG British, I call them Chinese but it’s a British brand, so….

MG4 is the 2nd most popular EV behind the Tesla Model Y
Ironically, MG have moved into the 11th place that Tesla vacated
Vauxhall are British No1, and as already mentioned, continue to occupy 7th place
Land Rover moved from 16th to 14th place, with 53.3k cars sold. Seems the British public still have a few pennies left to spend!
Mini is 17th
Jaguar 29th and only sold 14k cars, which I'm hugely disappointed with as I like the brand personally
No McClaren data unfortunately, or Rolls Royce, but we do have Bentley, at 1,312 cars sold

I've got some screenshots and stuff to add, along with the data tables I made, which I'll do later.

So what do you think? Any surprises in here?

Edited by soupdragon1 on Friday 5th January 14:32

[Sebring440]

Seems to be getting discussed here:

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...

[soupdragon1]

Sebring440 said:

Seems to be getting discussed here:

https://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&...

Yeah

I've went into a bit more detail behind the numbers. I guess the 1st couple of bits of my post are basically the same, but then I've looked at individual manufacturers etc to see how they've moved YOY being one example