European passenger car market increased by 2.2% in February, marking a slow down compared to January’s great performance. However, registrations reached 1,078,503 units, a very good result and similar to the one recorded in February 2008, right before the economic crisis.
Looking at the 5 major markets, only Italy (+6.2%, with 183,777 registrations, more than 10 thousand over February 2016) and Spain (+0.2%) expanded, while France, Germany and UK all posted negative numbers (respectively -2.9%, -2.6% and -0.3%). The overall upturn was mainly supported by the good performance of the new EU member states (+15.9%).
In the first two months of the year demand for new passenger cars grew by 6.2%, totaling 2,248,040 units sold. Amongst the main national markets Italy scored the highest result (+8.1%, with 355,656 registrations, 26.7 thousand more compared to the same period last year), followed by Spain, (+4.8%), Germany (+3.5%), France (+3.2%) and UK (+1.8%).