Even though a lot of people are already celebrating the ‘death’ of diesel cars, it looks like customers have a different opinion. At least that’s what the market in Germany is saying right now, with sales of the compression-ignition mills going up over the last month. Diesel sales increased by 7 percent in July, while petrol-powered cars went down by 1.8 percent. That means diesel is still accounting for 33 percent of all cars sold in the biggest economy in Europe.
At the same time, BMW reported a sales increase of 32 percent compared to the same month last year. The Bavarians were only third in an ad-hoc hierarchy of the biggest sales increments, being beat by Lexus with 39 percent and Land Rover with 44 percent. At the same time, Porsche went down by 22 percent while Mercedes-Benz recorded the same percentage but the other way around, increasing its sales. Alfa-Romeo posted a drop of 27 percent on the German market while Audi was down 14 percent.
Budget cars were quite popular with Seat and Skoda posting double digit increases at 13 percent. Ford also had a great month with an increase in sales of 27 percent, followed by Opel and Hyundai with 23 percent each. MINI was yet another surprise. Even though the British brand isn’t doing great in certain markets, like the US, things are going great in Europe, with the winged brand posting an 18 percent increase in sales in Germany. The launch of the MINI Cooper SE hatch should improve those numbers even more.
The German market is steadily on the rise too. 332,788 units were sold in total last month, an increase of 4.7 percent overall compared to the same time period of 2018. During the first half of 2019 sales went up by 1.2 percent to a grand total of 2.18 million.
[Via: KBA]
