Vehicle sales continue year-on-year plunge
On an equally worrying note, vehicle exports were down by 46.9% year-on-year
While the SA new vehicle market saw a modest improvement of 3.4% in August compared to the previous month, sales are still substantially down year-on-year, with last month’s total sales figure of 33 515 units representing a 26.3% decline to that of August 2019.
Passenger car sales, once again, suffered the most because of car rental companies being almost completely dormant since the lockdown, falling 32.6%.
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On an equally worrying note, vehicle exports were down by 46.9% year-on-year, and are on track to fall by around 40% in 2020.
On the upside, there was a slight uptick in the market for medium and heavy commercial vehicles, which saw encouraging year-on-year gains of 7.7% and 9.0% respectively.
Naamsa (National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of SA), the entity keeping track of new vehicle sales in the country, says it expects activity in the new vehicle market to remain ‘slow for the remainder of 2020’ and added that the ongoing Eskom woes are not helping matters either.
‘Not only will the economy have to contend with consequences of the economic lockdown, it now has to deal with further rolling blackouts which come at the worst possible time for the SA economy,’ Naamsa said in response to August’s poor sales figures.
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