In August, 313,700 new passenger cars were newly registered in Germany. The passenger car market thus remained close to the previous year’s extraordinarily strong level. Despite one working day less, the decline was only 0.9 percent. Adjusted for working days, there was a slight increase. Since the beginning of the year, the Federal Motor Transport Authority has recorded 2.495 million new registrations. This corresponds to an increase of 0.9 percent.
VDIK President Reinhard Zirpel said: “The German passenger car market is again developing extremely robustly in August. Despite the high level of the previous year and dark clouds in the global economy, the market is maintaining its plus of around one percent. The surprisingly strong August allows the forecast that the market will remain above the previous year’s level until the end of the year”.
The international manufacturers achieved a market share of 42 percent in August and improved by 0.3 percentage points to 39.1 percent for the year as a whole. In Eastern Germany, they achieved a share of over 50 percent. The VDIK members sold a total of 976,700 new passenger cars.
New registrations of diesel passenger cars in August fell by 8.2 percent compared to the unusually high number of registrations in the same month last year, but increased by 2.1 percent overall in the course of the year. In the first eight months of this year, almost 33 percent of all new cars were delivered with diesel engines, 59 percent with petrol engines. According to KBA, 8 percent of newly registered vehicles had alternative drive systems. These include battery electric cars, hybrids, plug-in hybrids, fuel cell vehicles and gas-powered passenger cars.
In August, new private registrations fell by 0.5 percent to a good 103,000 units. Over the course of the year as a whole, the private market remained slightly in decline, but remained at its second-highest level since 2009. The import brands achieved a private market share of just under 49.8 percent in August and increased their share of private registrations in the current year to 47.3 percent (previous year 46.3 percent).
