Sales figures for new cars in the month of March have been announced in Australia and reveal a market dealing with the consequences of the Covid-19 outbreak.
According to figures released by the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (FCAI), a total of 81,690 vehicles were sold in Australia last month. Of those, 21,277 were passenger vehicles (26.7 per cent market share), 39,171 were SUVs (48.0 per cent share), and 18,162 were light commercial vehicles (22.2 per cent share). All up, sales are down 17.9 per cent from where they were in March 2019, mainly attributed to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the general economy.
Interestingly, sales in March were up from the first two months of the year where 71,731 vehicles were sold in January and 79,940 were sold in February.
Australia’s best-selling brand remains Toyota as in the month of March, it sold 17,583 vehicles, representing a 21.5 per cent share of the market, while also increasing its sales by 1.6% over last year. In second place was Mazda with 6,819 sales in March (down around 29 %) followed by Mitsubishi with 6,002 sales (down a little over 40%), Kia with 5,624 sales (up 6.6 %), and Hyundai with 5,306 sales (down around 31%). Holden, which will be killed off, sold 4,992 vehicles last month.
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Broken down by individual models, Toyota continues to dominate accounting for four of the nation’s six best-selling vehicles. Taking out the top spot is the Toyota HiLux with a total of 3,556 sales last month beating out the Ford Ranger but 21.4 per cent down from the sales recorded in March 2019. In third was the Toyota RAV4 with 2,991 sales (a 111.2 per cent increase from March 2019), followed by the Toyota Corolla with 2,812 sales, the Holden Colorado with 2,391 units sold, and the Toyota Land Cruiser that sold 2,043 examples.
