September seems to confirm the attempt of the car market in Italy to reverse the course – 13 months of negative results, in a row – and records a number of car registrations up 5.4% over last year. The final figure released by the Ministry of Transport follows the + 9.9% recorded in August. “These are positive signs, but still faint” highlights Gian Primo Quagliano of the Promotor Study Center. The Italian car market is still in a difficult situation, so much so that the balance sheet for the first nine months of 2022 closes with a drop of 16.3% over the same period of 2021.
Compared to the period prior to Covid, the market lost over a third of global volumes (-33.5%) with a gap, in absolute value, of almost half a million cars. “With a good dose of optimism it can be predicted that 2022 will close at around one million and 200 thousand registrations, a level from the late 60s of the last century” as the Promotor Study Center points out.
Among the brands, the double-digit growth of Audi, Bmw, Citroen, Alfa Romeo, Lancia and Mercedes in September 2022 should be noted compared to the same period a year ago. Skoda doubles volumes compared to a year ago while Toyota grows by 40%. The only brands in positive ground over the entire period, from January to September, are Alfa Romepo (+ 10.3%), Dacia (+ 10.4%) and Honda, alongside the exploits recorded from month to month by brands such as Dr and Cupra.
Furthermore, the economic survey carried out by the Centro Studi Promotor in September shows that 43% of dealers are also pessimistic about the near future. The crisis factors in the car market are still all very serious, starting with the shortage of semiconductors which lengthens the delivery times of cars, contracts the market and puts the dealer network under stress. In fact, 96% of dealers declare that they do not have sufficient stocks of new cars to meet demand.
“The sharp decline in the share of plug-in cars dropped to 4% in September (the second lowest of the year) and the flattening of that of pure electric cars to 4.5% (halving almost 8% in September 2021 ) – underlines Michele Crisci, president of Unrae – is a clear indication of the definitive exhaustion of the 2021 incentive effect and of the fact that the 2022 incentives are not yet fully operational after 3-4 months from the activation of the platform “.