Oxford, UK – West European car registrations in 2020 were down by 25% with a 29% fall in UK production, the largest of the major producing countries, according to data from LMC Automotive.
Car sales down 25% in Western Europe in 2020
In a year the consultants described as 'extremely challenging,' the UK registered 1.63m vehicles in 2020 compared with 2.31m in the previous year. Italy, was the next largest fall amongst the big consumers, with a 28% drop year on year to 1.38m registrations. French registrations fell by 26% to 1.65m.
German registrations fell by 19% to 2.92m registrations.
Smaller countries such as Portugal(-35%), Spain (-32%) and Greece 30% all recorded proportionately bigger falls, on much lower registrations. In Greece, for example, around 80,000 cars were registered in 2020.
Nordic markets were the most resilient in 2020, but even so Sweden, Finland and Denmark markets shrank by between 18-12%. The Norwegian market ended 2020 1% smaller.
LMC automotive said 'For West Europe's five largest markets, December was a disappointing end to a truly rotten year. One extra selling day last year did little to mitigate the coronavirus related disruption to registrations in December.
In the month of December registrations were down by 3.8% at 1.09 m units. compared with December 2019 , according to LMC Automotive.
