Suche
Mein Konto
Austria is breaking records with these new registrations
Europe's car market is in crisis; in Austria, new car registrations have even fallen to the level of the 1980s. However, extreme increases were reported in one area.
Austria is breaking records with these new registrations
The commercial vehicle market has its own laws. Although here too - similar to cars - the second half of the year was a disappointment, the annual balance for 2021 looks good: overall, new registrations of commercial vehicles in Europe increased by 9.6 percent. This is despite the fact that there were declines for the sixth month in a row in December and that they were still quite significant at minus 8.4 percent.
The reason for the apparently good annual balance is of course not due to real market strength, but rather to the base effect: the comparative year 2020, especially the first half of the year in which the corona pandemic broke out and the first lockdown took place, was simply so bad for the commercial vehicle sector that things could almost only go uphill.
1.88 million commercial vehicles were now registered in 2021, which the manufacturers' association ACEA recently announced. That is still 2.1 million units below the level from 2019, the last year before the Corona crisis.
The strongest growth last year was in the heavy truck segment, which was 21.2 percent more in demand across the EU than in the previous year. The light commercial vehicle segment experienced an EU-wide increase of 8.5 percent.
Austria is European champion
And in Austria? Well, there was an increase in new registrations of 60.9 percent for light commercial vehicles! This means that Austria is also the European champion when it comes to sales increases: no other EU country has recorded such strong growth rates.
The reason is, of course, not a pleasant one: the announcement of the introduction of the standard consumption tax (NoVA) for light commercial vehicles led to early purchases of delivery vans and the like over the course of 2021, which triggered a real boom.
The bill still has to be paid
We already know that the collapse will happen immediately and that the high tax burden will soon mean a rude awakening. Light commercial vehicles are becoming massively more expensive: this shows Calculation examples from the Austrian Fleet Association (FVA): In 2024, when the maximum NoVA rate should be 80 percent according to the government plan, the Opel Movano van, for example, would see a price increase of 30,898 euros: from a current net price of 42,647 euros to an impressive 73,545 euros! This is not a mood booster for the market!
In 2021, Austria appears extremely positive in the European comparison of new registrations: there is still a sales increase of 54 percent across all segments. Only Latvia can keep up with this. Of the major markets, only Spain had a negative impact (there was even a slight decline in new commercial vehicle registrations of 2.8 percent for the whole of 2021). Italy achieved growth of 15.5 percent, France 7.8 percent. The German commercial vehicle market, however, stagnated with an increase of 0.6 percent.