European car market continues slow road to recovery

JATO Dynamics has released its monthly European new car market analysis for June and the ‘H1’ period of 2009. Overall, the new car market has continued to improve over the first six months of the year although the figures are still significantly down on 2008. At the end of June the market was down 10.3% YtD, a 15.7% improvement on the January figure of 26.0% demonstrating a slow but progressive improvement each month.

Unsurprisingly, the Volkswagen Golf continues to dominate the sales charts with sales up 32.8% on the same month last year and Volkswagen remains the biggest selling brand in Europe.

“Mid-way through the year is a perfect point to take stock of the overall market and to look for established trends rather than short-term peaks and troughs in the market”, says David Di Girolamo, Head of JATO Consult. “With localised scrappage incentives now working consistently to improve sales, we can see steady and progressive improvements in new car registrations. It’s impossible to be conclusive, but with the continued roll out of incentive schemes and the possibility of some renewed consumer confidence, it would seem likely that by the end of the year the European car market could more or less recover to 2008 levels.”