Paris (AFP)
The French car market continued to recover in September, posting a slight drop of 2.97%, the manufacturers announced Thursday.
French groups remain on the decline, with PSA at -4.35% and Renault at -5.84%, but the Peugeot (PSA group, + 6.69%) and Dacia (Renault group, + 34.88%) brands are doing well, according to figures published by the Committee of French Automobile Manufacturers (CCFA).
168,291 new passenger cars were put on the roads of France, a decrease of 2.97%, while September 2020 had one more working day.
Over the first nine months of the year, registrations reached some 1,166,700 units, down 28.92% compared to the same period last year.
The market is slowly recovering from the spring collapse linked to the health crisis.
With an auto trade paralyzed by containment, vehicle deliveries collapsed 72% in March, 88.8% in April, then another 50.3% in May.
They then rebounded 1.2% in June and 3.9% in July, before falling back to 19.8% in August.
For François Roudier, spokesperson for the CCFA, "we had a fairly good end of the month with a lot of deliveries, which made up for a difficult start to the month".
According to him, it is possible that some models had delivery delays linked to the restart of factories in Europe.
Mr. Roudier indicated that the CCFA maintained a market forecast of -25 or -30% for the whole of 2020, with a sales figure of around 1.6 million for private vehicles, which would be the lowest figure in 15 years.
In September, French manufacturers recovered less well (-5%) than their foreign competitors (+ 0.02%).
The Volkswagen group, the leading importer in France, grew by 1.70% in particular, driven by numerous deliveries to Audi.
BMW is down 15.66% but Toyota (+ 5.06%) and Ford (+ 4.21%) show an increase.
© 2020 AFP