Germany’s new car market is expected to turn positive this year despite a current slowdown in demand, but sales will still fall well-below pre-pandemic highs, according to analysts at S&P Global Mobility.
(Bloomberg) — Germany’s new car market is expected to turn positive this year despite a current slowdown in demand, but sales will still fall well-below pre-pandemic highs, according to analysts at S&P Global Mobility.
“The market won’t sustain the growth of the first half of the year,” Martin Benecke, Senior Manager S&P Global Mobility, told the German magazine Automobilwoche. “But we still expect to reach around 2.8 million passenger cars in the current year.”
Last year, new car registrations reached 2.7 million. They rose 18.1% to 243,277 vehicles in July, driven by a 68.9% surge in battery electric vehicles (BEV), the KBA motor transport authority said Aug. 4. For the first seven months, new registrations were up 13.6% year-on-year to 1.6 million.
While he expects new registrations to rise to 2.9 million next year, Benecke said he doesn’t see the German car market returning to previous highs. In 2019, before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Germany recorded 3.6 million new car registrations.
“If things go well, it could reach another 3 million passenger cars. But no more”, Bennecke said of the German car market’s longer-term potential.
Carmakers are still working through their order books as long-running shortages of critical components such as semiconductors have eased. But the outlook is clouded by the prospect that supply chain bottlenecks could return amid surging demand for electric vehicles, and that consumers could cut back on spending due to high inflation and slowing global growth.
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