Labour Government must decide whether British car brands can take back control

The overall new car market growth of 6.0% YTD is broadly in line with expectations. While it is encouraging that the first half of 2024 breached the one million car registrations benchmark, nevertheless the market is still down 20.7% on the same period of 2019.

Within the market, there has been a lot more turmoil than the overall growth figure would suggest, writes David Francis.

Retail sales fell by 12.0% YTD, which is unsurprising given the low levels of consumer confidence. Currently consumer confidence is -12, (i.e. the number of people who are pessimistic outnumber those who are optimistic by 12 percentage points).

It will be interesting to see if confidence improves with the new government.

Something else the new government will be watching is the proportion of sales taken by BEVs. In the first half of the year, it crept up from 16.1% to 16.6%, which is still miles away from the government’s mandate of 22% for 2024.