Spanish True Fleet positive… just, while Private market takes a tumble

Spain is the only country from the EU-5 to see positive Total Market growth (numbers) for April. Spain’s Total Market finished at 105,000 registrations keeping it in the black by 1.6% over April 2016. The Private Market took a tumble, dropping by 14.5% but Spain was not alone as we saw a drop for the rest of the EU-5 also. True Fleet managed to remain positive for another month but only just with + 1.4% while Special Channels bore the most weight from the negative Private market and delivered + 30.5% keeping the Total Market month-on-month growth rate positive for the 44^th (!) month in a row.

The True Fleet Top 10 manufacturers had only one new entry for April but plenty of ranking changes. Renault kept the #1 spot for the 2^nd month but was closely shadowed by VW with only 33 registrations separating the two. Peugeot retained their 3^rd spot and BMW produced a + 15.7% to take the 4^th position. Toyota was the biggest climber inside the Top 10 moving from 10^th to 5^th with the growth of 21.3% pushed along predominantly by the C-HR but also by the Yaris which more than doubled its month-on-month figures with a 120.2% growth.

Ford, Mercedes, Audi and SEAT followed in the ranking with only Ford registering a positive growth. Helped in no small part by the Kuga whose strong numbers gave it almost 20.0% (19.9%) of the manufacturer’s volume for the month compared to only 7.2% last April. The 10^th position was the new entry and it was Citroën that achieved it, moving from 12^th place with an impressive growth of 57.7% (the highest inside the Top 10). The growth came mostly from the Berlingo, C3 and C4 which together made up 59% of the OEM’s monthly volume.

Our look into the Year-to-date True Fleet fuel segment rounds out our press release for April. Diesel remains king of the segment although its decline is pronounced in the YTD comparison. Last year diesel took a share of 82.4%, this year it stands at 77.5%. Diesel’s loss of almost 5 percentage points has gone mostly to petrol but 1.6% has ended up with the alternative fuels category with hybrid taking the lion’s share of that. It would come as no surprise to see Toyota at the top for volume growth in alternative fuels but what was surprising was that Toyota had the 2^nd highest loss in the diesel segment behind SEAT. Now whether this is the first example of manufacturers moving away from diesel while further promoting other fuels (C-HR so far only available as Hybrid for Spain) remains to be seen but it may be something to keep an eye on.