With a catastrophic year 2020 in terms of vehicle sales, and despite a more convincing recovery at the start of 2021, the French automotive market is far from its 2019 levels.
This year the CCFA (Comité des Constructeurs Français d’Automobiles) has decided to provide statistics for the French market in April 2021 with the year 2019 as a reference base. Indeed, the reference for the year 2020 in full strict confinement has no meaning. statistical. By proceeding in this way, it is possible to trace the real performance compared to a “normal” year.
A pointless comparison with 2020
It was without great difficulty that the manufacturers sold more cars in April 2021 than in April 2020. In full confinement, even if the restrictions are still in force in France, it was difficult to do worse! If we compare with 2019, the French automotive market stay well behind : with nearly 140,428 new car sales, registrations are still 25.4% lower than in April 2019.
If we put these figures into perspective with 2020, registrations show an increase of… 568.8%.“The April 2020 basis of comparison is unusable, with 20,997 registrations and a market totally at a standstill”, explains the CCFA.
In addition, we can justify this decrease by the semiconductor shortage which continues to slow down the sector and by consumers who have simply bought fewer vehicles, with the concessions closed but also the budgets of the French which are tightening with the crisis.
Great disparities among brands
At the manufacturer level, we find rather unequal figures if we compare with 2019. For example, we have French brands that are much more impacted: they fell by -31.34% over the given period, against only -15.67% for foreign brands.
For the group Stellantis, we have a drop of 30.62% for its brands: Alfa Romeo (-82.88%), Citroën (-35.41%), DS (-5.03%), Fiat (-46.42%) , Jeep (-30.71%), Maserati (-84.21%), Opel (-41.63%) and Peugeot (-23.37%). The group Renault for its part lost -32.50% with Dacia (-35.81%) and Renault (-30.65%).
The group Volkswagen is doing better, and managed to control the decline with an overall drop of -15.80%: Porsche (-25%), Seat (-13.25%), Skoda (+ 2.89%) and Volkswagen ( -24.30%).
For its part, the group BMW out of the game and achieves a “good performance”: -3.74% only! In detail, we have: BMW (-11.14%) and MINI (+ 11.94%).