Renault, Fiat and BMW show high double-digit gains in August
By Andrew C., 26 Aug, 2010. 0 Comments
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Would it surprise you to know that Renault, Fiat and BMW made high double-digit gains in European car production last month? It appears that government incentives did make a tremendous improvement on sales. J.D. Power Automotive Forecasting reports that Renault raised production 78.1% to 49,145 units. The Twingo was most in demand, for which output rose 82.3% to 9,906. As Fiat moved to satisfy demand for the Doblo and New Fiorino vans, its production went up 62.7% to 40,645 units. BMW increased production 38.1% to 43,837 units largely due to rising orders for the 5 series. Meanwhile, the output of Citroen, Peugeot, Ford, Skoda and Toyota also increased by double digits in August while Volkswagen brand's production rose 4.4% to 128,744.
While these are significant gains, overall production could not be prevented from slipping 14.4% to 790,156 units in August. It's a bit of a comfort though that this was the second-smallest year-on-year loss in 2009. It was in July when the smallest year-on-year loss was recorded when car output slipped 11.4% to 1,476,041 units. For western and eastern Europe including Russia and Turkey , the production during the first eight months of the year was down 27.0% to 9,547,895 units.
This year's production low point came in February when output slipped 39.7% to 1,070,474 units. Interestingly, the steep decline was observed right before the launch of scrapping incentives in the five major European markets. Since then, production numbers have been readily improving since governments started offering incentives of up to 5,000 euros to get people to trade in their old cars and replace them with new, more fuel-efficient models.
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