Sales of new passenger cars in the European Union will increase this year by almost 8 percent to 10.5 million units. That is what the European car industry association ACEA predicts. Last year, sales fell due to the ongoing chip shortage. In ACEA’s forecast, chip deliveries are stabilizing, allowing automakers to ramp up production again.
Should the car market indeed climb to 10.5 million units, as ACEA predicts, the total size of the market will still be almost 20 percent lower than in 2019, before the corona crisis broke out. In 2021, 9.7 million new passenger cars in the EU were registered. That was a decrease of 2.4 percent compared to a year earlier. Due to the chip shortage, manufacturers were forced to curtail their production, so that fewer cars came onto the market.
To avoid situations like this in the future, ACEA argues that the EU should do more to reduce its dependence on foreign chip deliveries. This should prevent ‘damage to strategic European industries’ in the future. The EU is currently working on plans to strengthen its own chip industry. The construction of our own chip factory is one of the options.
ACEA also states that there should be more charging points for electric cars in Europe. That position of the trade association is not new, but the increasing sales of electric cars are taken to illustrate that fact. Currently, almost one in five new cars sold in the EU is electrically rechargeable. The market share of fully electric cars will approach 10 percent in 2021.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl