New UK car registrations bounce BACK up in June – but still down by a third

New car sales in the UK improved significantly in June as car showrooms opened, but with 145,377 new car registrations they’re still down by 34.9 per cent on 2019.

The months of lockdown in the UK has decimated new car sales, and March, April and May have seen precipitous drops as car showrooms were closed and car manufacturing suspended.

But car showrooms opened up for business in England at the start of June (later in devolved parts of the UK) and manufacturing recommenced (at a lower rate than normal) , so June was always going to see a significant upturn in new car registrations.

In fact new car registrations managed to recover significantly with numbers down 34.9 per cent on 2019, a huge drop year-on-year but massively better than recent months.

Private sales were down even less than the average at 19.2 per cent, but fleet sales were still down 45.2 per cent, all of which means year-to-date sales are down 48.5 per cent, some 616,000 sales down on 2019.

Mike Hawes, SMMT CEO, said:

While it’s welcome to see demand rise above the rock-bottom levels we saw during lockdown, this is not a recovery and barely a restart. Many of June’s registrations could be attributed to customers finally being able to collect their pre-pandemic orders, and appetite for significant spending remains questionable.

Apart from Mike Hawes’ belief that a chunk of the cars registered in June were hangover orders from pre-lockdown, it could be buyers have held off committing until they knew whether there is going to be a scrappage scheme for cars. Now that seems to have been shot down by government, July’s numbers should give a better idea of where things are heading.