New car registrations rise 68.5%

R.O.R

Linky

The number of new private cars licensed for the first time rose 68.5 per cent in March, the Central Statistics Office said today.

Some 12,379 new cars were registered for the first time last month, compared to 7,345 in March 2009.

Consumers continued to opt for diesel models over petrol equivalents, with 62.1 per cent of the cars using the fuel compared to 34.2 per cent of petrol powered vehicles.

The number of goods vehicles also rose, climbing 45.6 per cent to 1,331, leading to a total of 14.665 new vehicles registered during March, a 57.6 per cent rise on last year.

The Government's scrappage scheme has helped boost the ailing industry, which has seen a large number of dealers go out of business during the ecnomic downturn.

In total, 20,711 vehicles were registered during the month, including imported cars, trucks and motorbikes. This is 19.5 per cent more than in the same month of 2009.

It's getting better, but I'd say March will probably be the highest month this year. Due to a lot of vehicles being ordered Decemeber / January and only just coming through now.

Still way, way down on previous years (Dublin has registered less than 18,000 vehicles to date - used to be at that level in mid Feb), and we'll probably see a big drop next year if the scrappage is discontinued. But at least it's nice to see new metal on the roads.

Saab Ed

Onwards and upwards. The recession is over and has been for about 6 months, but just like it started 18 months before anybody noticed , its probably going to take a similar time for people to feel confident enough to free themselves up a bit from the fruggleness they've been showing.

colm_mcm

If Renault got a move on those figures would have been January sales rather than March

BlackWizard

Saab Ed wrote: »

Onwards and upwards. The recession is over and has been for about 6 months, but just like it started 18 months before anybody noticed , its probably going to take a similar time for people to feel confident enough to free themselves up a bit from the fruggleness they've been showing.

Definitely a few sectors like science and IT have come out of this recession. Probably back in November it started to stabilise.

But there still are lots in construction related businesses which will have hard decisions to make this year and the countless unemployed too.

The government scrappage deal will artificially inflate these numbers too. So I wouldn't call anything until that is over. But definitely things have stabilised and there is a general bored/tired mood in a few companies with this recession malarkey. Alot of companies are not massively affected yet they are still bracing like they were or will be. This is slowly changing especially in the IT field.

I'd be interested to hear if any private sector companies are investing in their fleets. That would be a good sign of the current market mood.

peasant

A good friend of mine rose by over 100% this morning.
Overall that had about the same effect on the economy as Bill Cullen selling a few Renaults ...looks impressive on its own and you can gaze at it and say "wow", but not very significant in the big picture really.

ocokev

If they are using last year as a base then figures are still very poor.

Saab Ed

ocokev wrote: »

If they are using last year as a base then figures are still very poor.

Yeah but they used the previous few years figures as a benchmark on how we went into recession and they were un-realistic too, probably far more so than were we might end up at the end of this year. Its all relative.

Lets twist those figures with a hypothetical but ( I think ) not too un-realistic scenario.

If things are up 30% on last year which in itself was down 65% on the previous year yet the previous year was over cooked by 30-40%, then how out of kilter are we really. We're well on the road back to a middle ground IMO. Just because there are 100,000 builders out of work doesn't suggest zero growth in the building game, it might just be that we have 100,000 builders too many :cool:

Vertakill

Probably helps with customs getting their finger out when it comes to VRT evaders (although there's nothing quite like the thrill of suspecting every car on the road as customs whilst driving on a yellow reg!).