For the fifth month running, December continues on the uptrend, with 896,967K registrations, with the strongest increase attributed to strong gains in two out of the four key markets - Germany (38.1%), Italy (+21%) The other key market, France, maintained status quo with -0.1%.

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Spain engaged reverse with a -14.1% decline. This decline represents the end of four consecutive months of growth and this is attributed to setbacks on two fronts; The market is facing ongoing constraints in vehicle supply, which has severely hampered dealer operations. Furthermore, the rise in the price of fuel and the automobiles themselves have been factors that have had a detrimental impact.

On the macroeconomic front - The rising interest rates and household insecurity have all taken a hit and have reduced consumers' ability to spend. This has also hit dealers particularly hard in the last several months, since the market has shown a significant reduction in demand.

Making up 25% of the passenger car registrations, Volkswagen came in strongest at +19.7%, with Toyota Group (+19.7%) not far behind at  +19.6% YoY growth.

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How does January's figures look like?

We forecasted the European passenger car market by building 35 models composed of 30 leading indicators on data from 2003 to 2022. The indicator analysis strategy we selected was the stepwise search.

The top 3 leading indicators that were the most relevant were:

1. China Freight Waterways

2. World, Global Supply Chain Pressure Index, Total, Index

3. China Freight Traffic
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Indicio then weighted each model depending on performances at each horizon to create an aggregate forecast. The top-performing (by definition, most accurate) models were the VARX Lasso, VAR Elastic Net and HVAR Componentwise Lasso.

We anticipate 760,634K passenger car registrations in Jan which represents a 11.4% YoY increase compared to Jan 2022.

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