The European car market is in full crisis: registrations in the first quarter of the year reached 2,753,256 units, down 33.6% compared to the period January-March 2019, before the pandemic. The result is also negative compared to January-March 2021: in this case the drop is 10.6%, equal to a loss of almost 330,000 cars, of which about 110,000 were lost in the Italian market alone. Also the fault of a March to forget: in the third month of 2022, in fact, the thud was 36.4% on 2019 and 18.8% on 2021 (1,127,077 units, against 1,387,985 in March 2021) .
The strongest decrease in the first quarter of 2022 compared to the same period of 2019 was recorded by Spain (-48.1%), followed by the United Kingdom (-40.4%), Italy (-37.1%), from France (-34%) and Germany (-28.9%). And there don’t seem to be any encouraging signs for the months to come. “By projecting the result of the first quarter over the whole of 2022, a volume of registrations of 10,389,645 units is obtained, with a decrease of almost 5.5 million cars compared to 2019 and almost the level obtained in 1993 in the midst of a very serious economic crisis ”, stated the Centro Studi Promotor in an official statement.
In 2021 there was a simultaneous crisis of demand, penalized by the aftermath of the pandemic, and supply, greatly reduced by the microchip crisis (also a consequence of the pandemic). In 2022, the above lethal mix was joined by the growth in fuel prices, the reappearance of inflation, the slowdown in the post-Covid economic recovery and the war in Ukraine. A mixture of elements that is likely to have devastating effects on the automotive sector.
