See all Motoring NewsThe Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI), today released the official 201 new vehicle registration figures for January. The report sees new cars registrations down 3.5% when compared to January 2019. While Light Commercial vehicles (LCV) are up 2.1% and HGV (Heavy Goods Vehicle) registrations are showing an increase of 8.8%.
Despite a decline in new car registrations an important stat of note was the reduction in CO2 emissions.The average CO2 emissions (108.33g/km) relating to a new car sold in January 2020 reduced by 5.8% on the comparison (115.04g/km) to the same time last year.
Diesel continues to remain the most popular engine type (42.1%) following by petrol (39.6%), hybrid (13.6%) which gained a significant increase in market share along with electric (2.9%) and plug-in hybrid (1.8%).
Toyota was the top selling car brand in January 2020 with 4,309 units registered. Most of this is down to their extremely popular Toyota Corolla, which takes the top spot as the most sold car with 1,631 units registered in the month.
New electric car registrations increased with 898 registered in January 2020, compared to 799 in January 2019. With the top selling electric model again being the extremely popular Nissan Leaf with 296 units registered, and accounting for 33% of all electic car sales in January 2020.
Top Selling Car Brands January 2020
Used car imports saw a 26.4% decline in January when compared with the same period last year.
The SIMI Review highlights that the Irish economy will perform strongly in 2020. This should be supportive of consumer spending. However, the Irish consumer is still behaving in a relatively cautious manner. Personal spending power remains under pressure from increasingly expensive big-ticket spending items such as rents, mortgage repayment, health insurance and dwelling insurance. Apart from the economic aspects, there are a number of non-economic factors that are likely to be influential in 2020.