UK market rebounds

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Good news continues to roll into the UK car market. Figures recently released for September this year showed that more than 400,000 cars were registered in a single month for the first time since March 2008, suggesting that the market is now back to where it was before the financial collapse five years ago.

Sadly, however, only one of the top 10 best-selling cars in that month was actually made in the UK: the Sunderland-built Nissan Qashqai was the ninth most popular car sold here, at 7771 units. This sounds impressive until you consider the Ford Fiesta, which topped the chart, accounted for 20,629 units, meaning one in every 20 cars sold is currently a Fiesta.

In the meantime car manufacturing also goes from strength to strength, with the latest figures indicating that something close to 1.6 million cars will be built here this year. If that happens it will be the best performance by the industry since 2005 and add further weight to those who claim the UK will soon overtake France as the second-largest car manufacturing nation in Europe. That said, even if French production figures continue to fall from their current 1.9 million units and Britain overtakes, it’ll be a while before it’s knocking on Germany’s door, currently producing 5.5 million units per year.

Andrew Frankel