- Mercedes car sales back in reverse
- As are BMW and Audi car sales
- Electric and PHEV registrations sustain June market
- BYD and Jaecoo Omoda make significant gains
WITH the half-year figures now in, it’s clear that sales of new Mercedes cars are struggling. Now in its third year operating under an agency agreement, the brand hasn’t built on what was a highly positive 2024.
Registrations look negative across the board for the German premium brand. Year-to-date Mercedes is down more than 7% in a market that’s up 3.5%. That percentage drop equates to 3,762 units down on the first half of last year, with June accounting for 761 of that drop.
Mercedes market share is running at 4.6%, down from 5.1% this time last year and world away from its 2019 year-end position of 7.4% share.
Premium Germans also on the slide
Mercedes isn’t the only traditional premium brand that’s suffering in the current market. German rivals BMW and Audi are both also significantly down this year.
BMW is down more than 4,000 units year-to-date (-821 for June) – will its new Head of Corporate help reverse that? – and Audi is the fastest falling brand, running a whopping 11,779 units down in the first six months of 2024.
The non-German premium brands do seem to be faring better. Chinese-owned Volvo and sister brand Polestar are both significantly up; nearly 3,500 for Volvo and more than 5,500 for Polestar which now has a range of three cars, where a year ago it essentially had a single model available.
Polestar has also transitioned back from direct sales model to a non-genuine agency agreement for the express reason of selling greater volumes.
Land Rover – another brand that decided to shelve its agency plans – is also performing well this year, with a 2,401 unit gain year-to-date.
The Cox Automotive view on June 2025 car sale figures
“The 6.7% year-on-year growth in June, alongside a 3.5% increase year-to-date, reflects a welcome sign of resilience in the UK new car market. While private registrations showed a modest recovery, fleet activity continues to dominate, highlighting the lasting impact of cost-of-living pressures on retail demand. Indications of heightened end-of-quarter tactical and short-cycle activity suggest manufacturers were pushing hard to hit mid-year targets, with reports indicating that nearly 30% of June registrations occurred on the final day of the month.”
Philip Nothard, Insight Director, Cox Automotive International
Fuel mix: electric up, fossil down
While the overall market is running up 3.5% in H1, helped by a 6.7% hike for the June figures, this rise is entirely down to gains from the BEV and PHEV sectors.
Despite the SMMT warning that car makers are still running behind the Government’s ZEV Mandate target trajectory, EVs accounted for 21.6% of new car registrations in H1. And in June that mix was almost at 25%.
In unit terms, EVs are up 57,745 cars on the same time last year with PHEVs up more than 25,000 units. That sits against a combined petrol and diesel drop of nearly 48,000 cars.
The multi-brand groups
Volkswagen Group and Stellantis, both with a multitude of brands to balance, are both dealing with mixed performances.
Aside from Audi’s dismal figures, SEAT is, arguably, in a worse position. While the 9,000 unit drop it has experienced year-to-date is less than Audi’s, in percentage terms it’s far greater. SEAT is running 42% down this year against Audi’s 18% drop.
However, the rest of the VW Group is performing well. In total, the group is up 1,730 units this year on a total of 233,038 new cars.
Stellantis, which has 10 brands in the UK car market, is up 10,872 on a total of 120,655. Citroen is the worst Stellantis performer, down more than 6,000 units. Fiat is also doing poorly, down nearly 2,000 cars in H1. The flipside to this is Peugeot which is up more than 14,000 units and Jeep up nearly 3,000 cars.
One difference between the two groups is that VW Group (excluding Bentley) doesn’t have any brands with low volumes. For VW Group that means every brand is significant. However, for Stellantis, you’d have to question the efficiency of having very low volume brands that will require attention and may distract from the higher volume names. It’s worth noting that while DS is up 64% year-to-date, it’s also registered fewer than 1,000 cars. And Alfa Romeo has only registered just over 1,000 cars.
Source: SMMT
Winners and losers in the June 2025 new car market
Once again BYD is making massive inroads into the UK new car market. In June it took 2.4% market share. And in H1 it was up nearly 16,500 units.
Similarly, Chery-owned Jaecoo and Omoda took more than 2% of the UK market in June and for the year-to-date the brand is up nearly as many units as BYD.
At the other end of the table, the Japanese trio of Honda, Toyota and Nissan are all down at least 4,500 units and in Nissan’s case it’s running down 5,787 cars on the same time last year.
Top 5 fastest growing brands YTD
Bottom 5 fastest shrinking brands YTD*
1 BYD +16,486
2 Peugeot +14,007
3 Volkswagen +10,604
4 Jaecoo +8,399
5 Omoda +6,941
5 Toyota -4,768
4 Nissan -5,787
3 Citroen -6,434
2 SEAT -9,022
1 Audi -11,779
* Jaguar would be in this list, but we’ve excluded it as technically it’s left the market.
June market – what else did we see?
👉Renault is riding high YTD but June saw a small decline. This is odd. You’ve got to wonder, did it hit its Q2 targets early and take its foot off the gas? Or is it supply constrained?
👉June diesel sales were up 20 units on the same month last year.
👉Tesla, as we’ve been saying in these analyses, we won’t really know how Elon’s car company is doing until at least September. Supply is historically erratic and this year has seen the replacement of its biggest seller the Model Y which has just exacerbated that situation. That said, June registrations were back above 2024’s figure.
Read our analysis of May new car 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.
