Wednesday, November 03, 2021
“At the height of the crisis”
Car sales in Germany continue to collapse
The ongoing shortage of semiconductors is hugely depressing car sales in Germany, because the chips are indispensable in the automotive industry. In October there were therefore 35 percent fewer new registrations than a year ago. There is talk of a “paralysis of the new car market”.
The ongoing chip crisis is causing the new car market to collapse further: According to the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA), 178,683 new cars were registered in October, 34.9 percent less than in the same month last year. In addition, the number of new registrations fell for the fourth month in a row. Of the German brands, only Smart was able to record an increase in new registrations (13 percent) – all other German brands recorded declines.
According to the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA), 2.2 million new cars were registered in the first ten months – five percent fewer than in the same period of the previous year. According to the association, production in the German automobile plants also fell by 38 percent in October – according to this, 237,000 cars were manufactured. Calculated over the first ten months, that was a minus of eight percent.
The main reason for the lower production are delivery bottlenecks for semiconductors. The chips are essential components for the automotive industry.
As the VDA also announced, the share of electric cars in new registrations reached a new record at a good 30 percent. New electric registrations rose in October by 13 percent to 54,400 vehicles. This slowed growth in registrations. New registrations of purely battery-electric cars increased by 32 percent, while those of plug-in hybrids fell by five percent.
“Sad reality in the second year of the crisis”
The management consultancy EY spoke of a “paralysis of the new car market”. For the year as a whole, new vehicle sales could amount to 2.6 million vehicles, the experts forecast. That would be a decrease of ten percent compared to last year. In the two pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, “around 1.5 million fewer cars were sold in this country than could potentially have been sold”.
“The effects of the shortage of chips on the new car market are massive; we are currently at the height of the crisis,” said EY automotive market expert Peter Fuß. “Extremely long delivery times, angry customers, falling sales – that is the sad reality in the second year of the crisis.”
The situation is similarly weak in other European countries, such as Austria, France and Italy. There, too, new registrations fell by over 30 percent in October, according to EY.