3rd ICAI 2024

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2024

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

The dynamic growth rate in passenger car registrations in the Asian region is well illustrated in Figure 4, which shows the number of passenger car registrations in absolute terms by region. In 2005, around 15 million passenger cars were sold in both the Europe and the Asian region. Sales in Asia peaked in 2017, when almost 41 million passenger cars were sold. Sales in 2022 were 37.5 million passenger cars. China alone accounts for 23.6 million units of cars sold ( Šaroch et al ., 2023). Sales in the EU27+EFTA+UK were 11.3 million units in 2022 (22% share).

Figure 4: Development of passenger car registrations by continent (mn)

Source: OICA

3.2 Passenger car market in European Union The EU passenger car market experienced a slight decline in 2022, but 2023 was already a growth year after four years of decline. Despite these encouraging signs, however, sales figures remained well below the pre-pandemic levels (even including data for the UK leaving the EU in 2020) that we saw in 2019 (ACEA, 2023). The highest new passenger car registrations in the EU were in 2007 (15.5 million passenger cars) before the economic crisis (Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in that year). In 2019 (already with another new country from 2013, Croatia), new registrations reached 15.3 million passenger cars. Since then, and especially during the coronavirus crisis, there has been a decline in sales. Thus, individual car companies must be able to cope with challenging market conditions. A great importance in this is the strength of each country’s car industry, which is a combination of trade based positional power, ownership and control power, and innovation power in the automotive industry (Pavlínek, 2022).

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