3rd ICAI 2024

International Conference on Automotive Industry 2024

Mladá Boleslav, Czech Republic

Figure 5: New passenger car registrations in EU (in millions)

Source: ACEA, European Commission, data for the EU as a whole – with new accession countries, excluding the UK from 2020 The EU passenger car market has historically been dominated by European brands in terms of absolute numbers. In recent years, however, there have been fluctuations in the market shares of different brands. Despite a 15% decline in sales between 2017 and 2019, European brands have remained prominent in the European passenger car market. European brands still maintain a market share of around 70%. The sales performance of American brands in the European market was relatively stable until 2010. From 2006 to 2010, the number of new registrations ranged between 1.3 and 1.6 million vehicles sold per year. However, then there was a gradual decline to around 0.5 million in 2021 (influenced by the pandemic and Brexit and a reduction in the total number of new cars registered in the EU by around 2 million cars registered in the UK). However, in recent years, there has been an increase in the overall sales and share of American cars, mainly due to the growing popularity of the Tesla electric car brand. The reason is also the pressure to switch to electromobility not only in the EU ( Šaroch et al ., 2023). Outside of the European brands, the largest number of passenger cars sold in the EU were Japanese brands, averaging around 1.8 million units. However, Korean brands have been growing in popularity in recent years, overtaking Japanese brands in 2021 and selling 1.34 million cars in the EU in 2023. Chinese brands have virtually no market share (according to ACEA data) in Europe (Volvo is considered European brand for the purposes of this study, even though it is majority owned by a Chinese company).

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