The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said new car registrations last month numbered 426,170.<\/p>\n
From September last year, the figure was down 9.3%.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, diesel sales – which have been hit by worries over air quality – fell by 21.7%.<\/p>\n
It was the first time in six years that the key September market had fallen.<\/p>\n
Because it marks a change in the licence plate series that indicates how old vehicles are, September is normally a big month for car sales.<\/p>\n
Economic and political uncertainty, as well as confusion over air quality plans, had led to a fall in consumer confidence, according to the SMMT.<\/p>\n
However, it praised carmakers who were making trade-in and scrappage deals available to UK buyers, saying they were proving popular and should be encouraged.<\/p>\n
“September is always a barometer of the health of the UK new car market, so this decline will cause considerable concern,” said SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes.<\/p>\n
“Business and political uncertainty is reducing buyer confidence, with consumers and businesses more likely to delay big-ticket purchases.”<\/p>\n
The drop in September sales now mean car sales have fallen for the seventh month in a row. The last time there was a decline in September car sales was in 2011, when it fell by a mere 0.8%.<\/p>\n
For the year as a whole, sales have reached 2,066,411, representing a fall of 3.9% on the same period last year.<\/p>\n
Registrations of new cars have been declining for six months.<\/p>\n
Samuel Tombs, chief UK economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said, “Car sales remain well below last year’s levels, as the inflation-driven squeeze on real incomes makes households reluctant to make major financial commitments.<\/p>\n
“In seasonally-adjusted terms, however, we estimate that registrations were 9.7% higher in [the third quarter] than [the second quarter], when sales were hit by April’s increase in vehicle excise duty.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In a move that one industry body called a \u201ccause for concern\u201d, car sales in the UK fell 9% in September. The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said new car registrations last month numbered 426,170. From September last year, the figure was down 9.3%. Meanwhile, diesel sales – which have been hit by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101,"featured_media":24299,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,239,112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-news","category-motoring","category-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theasiantoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}