The return to grace of Japanese compact estate cars
- A few weeksapart, Toyota and Honda have unveiled their first compact estate cars in a decade. The Toyota Auris and Honda Civic estates mark the return to grace of estates in this category, as both Japanese manufacturers had gradually abandoned them, with the preceding generations of the Auris and Civic not having estate car versions.
- For a long time, estate cars' market share accounted for approximately 15% of the European market,with major disparities depending on the cars' segmentation. The A and B segments had few saloon cars, whereas for the D and E segments, saloons accounted for nearlyhalf of sales. The C segment was in-between these two trends, with saloon car versions accounting for 20 to 30% of sales.
- Over the last twelve years, estate cars have faced increasing competition from MPVs, and then more recently from SUVs and crossovers. Nowadays, estate cars still constitutes lightly more than 13% of sales on the European market, which is encouraging certain manufacturers to relaunch this vehicle body type, like Honda and Toyota at the latest Geneva motor show.
