Car manufacturers have done good business in Europe in the past year. Sales of new passenger cars increased by almost 14 percent compared to a year earlier. Europeans together bought 10.5 million new cars.
The figures increased because sales in 2022 were under pressure. At the time, the automotive industry was struggling with shortages of parts such as chips. As a result, cars could not be delivered, or could only be delivered with a delay.
Some of the new cars sold in 2023 will be deliveries of previously ordered cars, the European automotive industry interest group (ACEA) calculated.
In the Netherlands, the number of new cars sold increased even faster in 2023. We bought no less than 18.5 percent more cars than in 2022. For fully electric cars, the increase was even almost 56 percent.
In the last month of last year, European car sales actually collapsed, ACEA reports. Manufacturers sold just over 867,000 cars in December, 3.3 percent less than in the same month last year. This is partly because sales of electric cars in Germany collapsed due to the end of a subsidy scheme.
