The European car market grew by 4.5% in the first half of 2024
- The European automobile market (30 countries = EU + United Kingdom + Switzerland + Norway) for passenger cars increased by 4.5% in the first half of 2024 compared to the first half of 2023. This is a slowdown in growth because this market had grown by 13.7% in 2023 compared to 2022. And we are still far from the figures reached in 2019, since the gap between the first half of 2024 and the first half of 2019 is more than one million fewer passenger cars.
- If the market trend is maintained until the end of the year, we will reach a volume of 13.4 million passenger cars compared to 15.8 million in 2019 and 15.6 million in 2018. But this will already be better than the 12.8 million passenger cars reached in 2023, the 11.3 million reached in 2022, the 11.8 million in 2021 or the 12 million reached in 2020.
- But according to Inovev, it is not certain that what was observed in the first half of 2024 will continue in the second half. This market is indeed suffering from an upmarket move because the price of cars has increased significantly and small, inexpensive cars have gradually disappeared one after the other. In addition, the arrival of battery electric vehicles has resulted in the arrival of expensive cars at a time when the purchasing power of Europeans is stagnating.
- In this context, the Volkswagen group remains the market leader with 25.6% of market share ahead of Stellantis (16.6%) and Renault (9.8%). Next come the Hyundai-Kia groups (8.2%), Toyota (7.6%), BMW (6.8%), Mercedes (5%) and Ford (3.3%), which is becoming a second rank carmaker. It should be noted that all Japanese carmakers represent 14.5% of the European market, far ahead of Korean (8.2%) and Chinese (2.8%) carmakers.