New car sales rise 29%
February 4th, 2010 by Richard Aucock
NEW car sales for January rose by almost 30 percent with 145,479 new motors sold by car dealers.
SMMT official have confirmed this is the 7th successive month of new car sales rises.
This rise has come despite the introduction of the new 17.5 percent VAT rate – suggesting that the UK new car market now has real resilience.
Again, scrappage has been key. The new car scrap scheme accounted for 17.8 percent of all new car sales in January.
This is a lesser proportion of new car sales than in previous months though. It suggests that car makers are already starting to wean themselves off the scheme.
‘The 29.8 percent percent increase in January new car registrations provides a better than expected start to 2010 for the UK motor industry,’ said SMMT chief Paul Everitt.
‘Scrappage continues to lift demand successfully and today’s announcement of a continuation of the scheme to the end of March will allow the maximum number of people to benefit from the budget that’s still available.’
We are not out of the woods yet, though.
‘Industry expects another difficult year with the availability of finance, consumer confidence and sustaining demand post-scrappage, key to performance in the second half of the year, but signs of recovery in the fleet and business sectors are encouraging.’
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Scrap scheme extended to end of March
Tags: new car sales, SMMT