It’s funny how, after a day of good summer weather in Ireland, we all rush out and buy new sunglasses and shorts, dust off the barbecue and plan for the weekend ahead spent outdoors in the sunshine.
This year we were incredibly lucky and it seems the good weather got under the skin of car buyers too. Carzone’s site data clearly shows spikes in searches for open-topped cars throughout the summer.
The first noticeable spike came in June, when we had a mini heat wave across the country. June 10 was the busiest day of the year for cabriolet searches, recording 89% more traffic than the year before.
While general search numbers remained high for the next few days (Carzone was running a high-profile television advertising campaign at the time) convertible searches dropped by 49% in three days - coinciding neatly with a return to rain!
However, the trend returned in July, when Ireland experienced a particularly long and hot heat wave. There’s a linear relationship between the number of hours the sun shone on a given day and the number of searches for open-topped cars that evening and the next.
Naturally, cabriolet sales remain relatively low in Ireland (less than one per cent of the total fleet are open topped cars), but extremes of weather in general does affect how Irish car buyers think.
Looking back at the search data from December 2010, for instance (the coldest on record and marked by consistent heavy snowfall), the first Friday of that month saw more than four times the number of searches for SUVs than the week before.
SUV searches remained high all month and, somewhat bizarrely, rose again on December 21/22, possibly as people began to worry about being stranded for Christmas!
While used car sales have never been so buoyant, new car sales have slumped this year, in line with consumer confidence in the economy. Up to the end of September, figures released by SIMI (Society of the Irish Motor Industry) revealed that year-to-date registrations are down 7% on 2012, which itself was down 12% on 2011.
Using the data up to the end of September, Volkswagen is the bestselling brand and its Golf model is the best overall selling car.
That dovetails neatly with Carzone’s search data, where the Golf was the most searched for car - at an astounding rate of 410,338 searches per month.
Irish buyers continue to aspire to greater things though, as evidenced by the fact that the most searched for brand on Carzone so far this year is BMW, with the 3 Series and 5 Series occupying second and third place behind the Golf in model searches.