- No uptick in Ford sales as suggested for H2
- Meanwhile new car sales increase by 5.5% year-on-year and 2.5% for the month of July
- Fleet and business sales do the heavy lifting
- Interest rate drop will help market further retailers tell Broker News
FORD’S new models cannot arrive quickly enough to revive the fortunes of the once market-leading brand.
July’s new car registrations have seen the Blue Oval’s sales slide again with Ford recording a drop of nearly 3,500 units in the month compared with the same month last year. This brings Ford to a unit drop of just more than 19,000 cars over the first seven months of 2024.
A month ago, Ford said its figures would “correct themselves over the rest of the year” with the year split into two halves (see June new car analysis below). While July only marks month one of the second half of 2024, the drop makes the final five months even hard to recover.
Ford is pinning its hopes on the arrival of new product to stop the sales slide, including a revised Puma (already the UK’s number one seller), revised Kuga and new all-electric cars the Capri and sister car the Explorer – which is in showrooms already.
In percentage terms, Ford is now running down 23% year-to-date with a market share of 5.6%, its lowest ever figure. A year ago Ford had 7.7% of the market, and pre-pandemic in July 2019 it held a market-leading 10.2% share.
Overall trend in new car market for July 2024 is up
Source: SMMT
While Ford’s share has gone down, the overall market continues to improve, with total registrations up 5.5% so far this year and July’s total up 2.5%. However, the SMMT has revised down its forecast for the year to 1.98 million cars.
Perhaps more importantly, it has revised down the predicted BEV mix to 18.5% from 19.8%. The Government’s ZEV Mandate requires individual car brands to hit 22% this year, although there are rules that allow low CO2 cars such as PHEVs to reduce the 22% number.
Fleet and business (including push registrations) continue to account for the vast majority of EV numbers as the retail uptake decreases. The fleet and business sector accounts for 82.8% of BEV car units so far this year, up from 79.7% in the first seven months of 2023.
“Fleet registrations, led by the huge popularity of salary sacrifice car schemes, continue to drive the uptake of EVs. This sends a clear message to the new Government. It needs to maintain access to these employee benefits and prolong current Benefit-in-Kind tax incentives in the upcoming 30 October Budget if it wants to have any chance of meeting its ZEV Mandate and Phase Out targets.”
BEV market share year-to-date is finally starting to rise and at the end of July accounted for 16.8% of the market against 16.1% a year ago. The uplift came thanks to a strong July; 18.5% of registrations in the month were BEVs.
Winners and losers in the July 2024 market
Retailers that Broker News spoke to in the past month provided mixed messages – depending on the brands they represented.
Where there was consensus was around the cut in Bank of England interest rates. The interest rate drop was universally welcomed, with one retailer saying:
“A drop in the Bank of England rate really, and almost immediately, helps put a little bit more spending power back in people’s pockets and that means they can spend a bit more per month on their next car.”
“The Bank of England’s base rate reduction last week was a positive and welcome sign. Our baseline forecast is marginally more optimistic than the SMMT’s projections, but we continue to monitor movements closely and caution that Q4 could see some dramatic movements as manufacturers manoeuvre to avoid ZEV penalties.”
Where the market used to move as a whole, or at least by sector, today’s new car registrations are best viewed brand by brand – even within the same parent company.
Both the Stellantis brands and the Volkswagen Group companies are good examples.
At one end of the Stellantis spectrum Peugeot is currently running up more than 5,000 units year-to-date, while at the other, Vauxhall is down more than 6,000 cars this year. And there’s a good spread in between for the other seven brands. In total Stellantis, including Maserati, is up 134 cars in 2024.
It’s a similar story within Volkswagen Group. SEAT is up nearly 6,000 cars, while Audi is down nearly 4,500 cars so far this year.
The difference between the two groups, is that while Stellantis is near level with 2023, in total VW Group is up nearly 7,500 cars. This increase is due to strong performances from not only SEAT but also VW cars, Cupra and Skoda (even though Skoda had a poor July dropping more than 1,000 units over the same month in 2023).
Top 5 brands by unit increase YTD
Bottom 5 brands by unit decrease YTD
1 BMW +18,769
2 Renault +12,221
3 Nissan +11,459
4 Mercedes +10.594
5 Volvo +8,057
5 Audi -4,456
4 Polestar -4,606
3 Toyota -6,090
2 Vauxhall -6,167
1 Ford -19,127
Read our new car market analysis of June 2024 registrations
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Tristan Young is an award winning journalist with more than 25 years’ experience reporting on the automotive industry focussing predominantly on fleet and retail. As a self-confessed petrol-head, Tristan has a weakness for car classifieds. When he’s not writing about the automotive industry, he can usually be found outdoors with a small pack of border collies.
