European passenger car market expanded by 8.7% last month, reaching 1,177,746 units overall and marking the best October total in ten years, also as a result of the comparison with the bad performance recorded in October 2018. Except for the UK (-6.7%), all main national markets posted growth: Germany +12.7%; France +8.7%; Italy +6.7% (with 156,851 units, about 9.8 thousand over October 2018); Spain +6.3%.
In ten months, demand for new passenger cars slowed down by 0.7%. Looking at the 5 major markets, only Germany showed positive numbers (+3.4%), while all others contracted. From January to October, Spain recorded the lowest performance (+6.3%), followed by UK (-2.9%), Italy (-0.8%, with 1,624,922 registrations, nearly 14 thousand less compared to the same period last year) and France (-0.3%).