The worst car year since 1984

The worst car year since 1984

Now it's official: The year 2021 was one to forget for the domestic car trade - at least in the new car sector. The number of new registrations in the catastrophic year of 2020 was actually lower. With 239,803 cars, 3.6 percent fewer new cars were registered on the road in 2021 than in the previous year. Compared to the pre-crisis year 2019, more than a quarter fewer cars were sold. 

The Austrian automotive industry – automobile importers and vehicle dealers – has now announced this together with Statistics Austria. The new registration figures presented by Peter Laimer, responsible for vehicle statistics at Statistics Austria, documented the worst car year since 1984 when it comes to new car registrations. The 20-year average is 310,600 new car registrations per year. 

Chip shortage sends greetings

Until a few months ago, this would not have been thought possible: "In the first half of the year there was something of a spirit of optimism," recalls Günther Kerle, spokesman for the Austrian automobile importers, "but then the auto industry's dependence on computer chips and other essential parts from Asia became clear." Due to the shortage of semiconductors, delivery difficulties and long delivery times of up to a year arose. “The demand would be there, but the products usually aren't,” is how Kerle sums up the special situation.

There is actually no lack of demand, as the chairman of the Federal Committee for Vehicle Trade in the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, Klaus Edelsbrunner, emphasizes: “The demand is there, the customers are in our showrooms, but the vehicles are often not available or only after long waiting periods.” He also attributes this partly to the fact that manufacturers install the available chips primarily in electric cars (which they have to push because of fleet consumption alone) and in the high-priced models from which they earn more. But these are not necessarily the vehicles that customers want. 

Private individuals hardly buy electric cars

This is again shown by the analysis by Statistics Austria: This documents on the surface a real run on alternative drives: the registration numbers of gasoline and especially diesel cars fell significantly in 2021, but the number of cars powered by alternative fuels increased by almost double to 90,062 vehicles. However, most of these were purchased by legal entities, i.e. companies. In the case of purely electric cars (where sales more than doubled in the previous year to 33,366 vehicles), the proportion of company purchases even amounted to around 84 percent. In other words: “The private market doesn’t really want to get going,” as importer spokesman Kerle emphasizes.

He blames this primarily on two factors: the charging infrastructure, which is not yet optimally developed, and the existing “tariff jungle” with difficult to compare conditions from different providers, for which customers also need their own cards.

Meanwhile, Edelsbrunner sees dealers under pressure: "We are caught between two fronts: on the one hand, the politicians who are pushing e-mobility and which the manufacturers have to follow. On the other hand, the customers, who are still skeptical." Meanwhile, the manufacturer is doing well despite the weak registration numbers in many countries. They benefit from higher sales prices, since discounts are hardly an issue in times of delivery bottlenecks, and, as Edelsbrunner emphasizes, they make billions in profits. However, the dealers are under pressure and receive little help. Not even their annual targets would be lowered and in some cases they would even come under pressure from new concepts such as the agency models of some manufacturers.

2022 won't be much better

Industry representatives agree that 2022 won't get much better. This, especially since the two spoilsports, the COVID-19 pandemic and the chip shortage, will continue to accompany us. “2022 will be another very difficult year,” says Edelsbrunner.

Permanently announced tax increases must now come to an end, as Kerle demands, because they would further unsettle consumers. Speaking of taxes: The introduction of NoVA for light commercial vehicles led to early purchases in 2021 and led to more new registrations in the truck segment. One beneficiary of the situation with delivery difficulties was the used car market, which grew in 2021 and where prices also rose significantly. 

The best-selling passenger car brands in 2021 were VW, ahead of Skoda and BMW. However, all three had declining numbers. Almost all manufacturers recorded these, Audi, Fiat and Toyota were the exception with increases in the double-digit percentage range. VW also sold the most electric vehicles, followed by Tesla and Renault. The most popular vehicle category is still SUVs and off-road vehicles, which even increased by a further 18.8 percent and now account for almost 40 percent of all new car registrations in Austria.