Italian Autos Market slightly falls off after a promising start. Total sales in March reached 162,083 units (-3.7%), ending a 19-month consecutive positive streak. Fiat is still on top of the list with an 11.2% market share.
Market Trend and Outlook
The Italian auto market started the year in a strong mood. However, March puts an end to a 19-month positive string, with new car passenger sales decreasing 3.7% year on year with 162,083 sales. YTD sales are still up to 451,163 units (+5.7%).
Looking at cumulative data up to March 2024 brand-wise, Fiat reports the most sales at 50,512 (-0.2%), followed by Toyota -up 1 spot- at 33,950 (+22.5%) and Volkswagen -down 1 spot- at 32,598 (-4.4%).
Dacia is in 4th position with 27,811 sales (+13.3%), in front of Peugeot -up 1 spot- with 24,350 units sold (+9.4%), Renault -up 1 spot- at 20,940 (-0.6%) and Jeep -up 1 spot- in 7th with 20,839 registrations (+0.1%).
Ford loses 3 spots into 8th with 20,107 sales (-15.2%), in front of Citroen -up 1 spot- at 19,850 (+20.0%), and Audi -down 1 spot- in 10th with 19,171 registrations (+12.5%).
Looking at the best-selling model raking, deeply reported in the dedicated post, the Fiat Panda maintains the leadership selling 20.0% more than in the previous year, followed by the Dacia Sandero slightly far behind in second despite being up by 40.1%.
Medium-Term Market Trend
In the last decade the Italian market has had many ups and down. Starting at 1.8 million sales in 2010, it had 3 consecutive years of negative y/y sales with a minimum of 1.29 million reached in 2013. From 2014 up to 2019 the overall trend was positive, reaching a maximum in 2018 of nearly 2 million sales.
At the end of 2019 the Italian market was standing at 1.9 million sales, but with the pandemic in 2020 the market took a substantial hit, moving to the 1.4 million mark. This -27.1% drop marked the Italian auto-market for the following years.
Post-Covid hasn’t looked too good for demand in the Italian market. 2021 showed a slight sign of recovery (+8.9%) that faded away in the following year. In fact, 2022 totaled 1.32 million sales, the lowest of the decade and a 9.6% decrease from the prior year. Despite the overall downtrend, the market did grow in the last 5 months of the year and luckily the momentum continues going into 2023, that started very strong.
There are still some issues that the market will have to confront if it wants to recover from the fall of 2022: first of all the current European sentiment that is pushing more towards EVs is putting negative pressure on demand; and secondly in the last year we have seen a disruption in the global supply chain caused by a lack of raw materials, in particular for microchip production, that has lead manufactures to increase overall prices.
In 2023 the market performed very well, with yearly sales closing at 1.57 million, 18.9% higher than the prior year.
Tables with sales figures
In the tables below we report sales for all Brands, top 10 Manufacturers Group and top 10 models.
