With minus 24 percent, Austria trails Lithuania. The decline in the EU is eleven percent.
The Austrian car market has collapsed massively. Just 17,107 new cars were registered in May, down 24 percent from the same month last year, according to data from the ACEA manufacturers’ association released on Thursday. Austria is therefore behind Lithuania (down 33.2%) at the bottom of the European Union, which saw an 11% decline to 791,000 vehicles. It was the tenth consecutive negative month.
Since the beginning of the year, 85,846 cars have been registered in Austria, which is also a whopping 20.7% less than for the months of January to May 2021. The EU average was 13.7 percent. 3.7 million passenger cars have been registered since the beginning of the year.
Only a few countries like Cyprus, Greece, Latvia, Bulgaria, Romania and Sweden registered growth in May. In Germany, France and Spain, the car market fell by around ten percent, in Italy by 15 percent and in former EU member Great Britain by up to 20 percent.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine already exacerbated the sector’s problems in February and caused new registrations to fall to their lowest level since registration began 32 years ago. The lack of chips is also causing problems for car manufacturers.
(APA)