Registrations roller coaster continues through October
October was always going to be tough for the new car industry as it tried to compare with a historic month last year, according to the Motor Industry Association.
New vehicle registrations were 10 per cent fewer than October 2018 with 14,956, down 1705 units from the previous year.
But bear in mind that October 2018 was the strongest month of sales from the Motor Industry Association’s data set going back to 1975.
Motor Industry Association chief executive David Crawford said overall year-to-date sales were down by 4.8 per cent on the first 10 months of 2018, a reduction of just over 6500 fewer vehicles sold in 2019 to date.
“The month of October continues the up and down pattern for 2019, in what is a difficult and challenging market,” he said.
The top model for October was the Toyota Corolla (1269 units), followed by the Toyota RAV4 (887 units).
The Ford Ranger was bumped back to third (829 units) rather than its usual top spot.
But the Ranger ute still remains the top-selling vehicle year to date for 2019 with 8106 registrations.
Toyota remains the overall market leader with 28 per cent market share (4239 units, off the back of strong rental sales), followed by Ford with 8 per cent (1235 units).
Mitsubishi comes in third spot with 8 per cent market share (1168 units).
Registration of 10,322 passenger cars and SUVs for October 2019 were down 9.6 per cent (1135 units) on 2018 volumes, while commercial vehicle registrations of 4333 were down 11.6 per cent (570 units) compared with October 2018.
As all the Tesla Model 3 orders had been delivered by the end of September, the new electric vehicle sales fell back to their modest rate, said Crawford.