New car sales continue to soar

ACCORDING to figures released by Car History experts Motorcheck.ie, new car sales continue to soar and the Motor Trade looks on target to hit 120,000 units for the year and experience its highest sales since 2008.

At the end of the first quarter 2015 almost 64,500 New Cars have been registered, an increase of 29% (or 14,500 units) on the same period last year. The industry now expects to hit total sales of 120,000 units for the year.

This is in stark contrast to the used car market where overall sales are down 8% (approx. 18.5k units). Used car sales suffered when the recession hit just like new car sales but they have been slowly on the rise, and 2014 experienced a jump of 7% or 57k units on the previous year.

There were 841,000 used car sales last year, the vast majority of those were between private buyers and sellers. However there were almost 172,000 used cars sold by the Motor Trade to private buyers in 2014. This represented an increase of 20% in Trade business or an increase of 28,000 units sold by the Trade to private buyers last year. The decrease in used car sales has hit both private sales and trade sales with decreases of 9% and 13% respectively. Inter-Trade transactions have increased slightly whilst private trade-ins to the trade have remained steady.

Used cars imported from the UK have also been increasing year on year and this has been plugging the gap in used stock to a certain extent. The used stock shortage is now being magnified because used imports from the UK have also decreased.

‘What this all means for the consumer is less choice and availability,’ said Rochford, ‘and the knock-on effect is that prices of used cars are remaining steady and not depreciating at the rates you would expect, so it’s very much a seller’s market” he continued.

‘Unfortunately what we tend to see in these situations is that people feel under pressure to complete a deal and can make rash decisions. We would urge anyone buying a used car to always perform the necessary checks even if it seems like you might lose a rare deal,’ he said.