As sales of new cars begin to rise, thoughts are turning against carbon emissions and towards electricity, writes MICHAEL McALEER
CAR DEALERS whisper the word quietly before rubbing their lucky key rings:“recovery”. Talk to a dealer about 2009 and you can see his pupils dilate, lips purse and forehead break out in beads of sweat. Motor-industry executives still have screaming nightmares about last year. And the 09 registration plate remains a rare sight.
The collapse of the car market between July 2008 and December last year can be summed up quickly. Headline figures say it all. A drop in new sales of 62 per cent. More than 100 fewer dealerships. An estimated 10,000 lost jobs.
The reasons were manifold: changes to EU competition rules that allowed manufacturers to set new standards for dealerships requiring huge investments at the height of a property boom; a new motor-tax regime introduced on the cusp of the downturn that left dealers with forecourts full of stock nobody wanted; and ancillary investments in the property market that hit them for six when the recession engulfed the nation.
Yet a quick perusal of the number plates in any shopping-centre car park will tell you that the 10-registration plate is starting to make its presence felt.
Sales are up 46.8 per cent to the end of July, with 74,111 new cars. All expectations are that by year’s end the number will have reached 85,000. It’s not quite the heady days of the Celtic Tiger, when new-car sales reached 230,804 in 2000, or even 187,540 in 2007. The recovery is a far more tempered affair.
Take the time to look up from the number plate and you’ll spot another difference. The Irish motorist is downsizing, in engines at least. The years of excess, when thirsty SUVs rumbled through the city streets, are a thing of the past.
An example of the shift can be seen in the sales of Land Rovers. In 2007, 2,077 of the SUVs were sold in Ireland. By 2009 that total had fallen to a minuscule 89. During the same period Porsche sales dropped from 89 to 11. Since then the Republic’s only Porsche dealership has closed its doors.
But the changes in Irish car-buying tastes are more substantial than the obvious drop-off in prestige brands as the economy came a cropper. Where once the boast at the school gate and golf club was about price and performance, now it’s about fuel efficiency and emissions.
Few thought many motorists would ever contemplate carbon emissions when it came to their car choice. The gas was increasingly linked in media reports to climate change, but its influence on car buyers was nonexistent.
Then came the changes in tax policy, introduced in July 2008. Instead of a 22-band annual motor-tax regime based on engine size, in which the jump from one rate to the next ranged from €24 to €273, we had a seven-band system based on CO2 emissions. The jump between each band is now much greater, ranging from €54 to €1,050. Suddenly, motor tax was a deciding factor, and diesels, once regarded as too agricultural for suburban sophisticates, were de rigueur.
Between January and June 2008 petrol engines accounted for 62.7 per cent of sales, with the majority of new cars sold during those six months having emissions of 155g/km or more.
Jump forward to the first six months of this year and 63.8 per cent of new cars sold were diesel, with 77.6 per cent recording official emissions figures of less than 140g/km.
Part of this – 10,000 of the new-car sales to date – is down to the scrappage scheme, which applies to cars with emissions of below 141g/km, but according to Alan Nolan, director general of the Society of the Irish Motor Industry, emissions and tax are by far the dominant themes of forecourt conversations these days.
Yet while buyers have turned their back on thirsty behemoths, the changes are more subtle than simply Irish buyers abandoning bigger cars for superminis.
The bestselling car here remains the Ford Focus, as it was in 2008. And Nissan’s Qashqai – an attempt to add SUV styling to a regular family hatchback – is currently at number three.
The Mercedes E-Class and Audi A4 remain in the top 20 bestselling models, well ahead of models like the Ford Ka or Fiat Panda. The BMW 5 Series has sold as many as the Nissan Micra this year.
The changing tastes have more to do with improved fuel efficiencies. And in that regard the motor industry has made huge leaps in engine development in the past three years, largely on the back of an increasing international focus on transport as an area where carbon emissions needed to be addressed. Several big premium models now have fuel-economy and emissions figures that would have been held by superminis in the past.
Ultimately, motor-industry executives are seeking to remove the car from the carbon debate. For that they may hope the much-hyped electric revolution captures an audience. Mainstream electric cars can be ordered now and will arrive on Irish roads next year. A mini-revolution is under way. We’re being promised rapid improvements in the distances these vehicles can travel between recharging, akin to the improvements made in mobile phones and laptops when they first arrived.
Time will tell. One thing is certain: Irish car-buyers seem as focused on the fuel gauge and the tax disc as they are on a car’s status or its speedometer.
