It seems that often now we speak about time based on covid rather than actual years, “last time I went on holiday was the year before covid”, or “she got married during covid”. Well I thought I would keep with this trend going by taking a look into car registrations in the last 5 years; 2 years prior to covid, the covid years and the year after.
The graph below shows the number of cars registered for the first 6 months of each year, and the percentage at the top is how much those 6 months contributed to the whole year.
As usual we’ve then split the registrations between the different fuel types, lumping MHEV into petrol or diesel, as appropriate.
In every year other than the first covid year (2020) the total at the end of month 6 was around 55% of the ultimate total for the year. If this is the case for 2022, we’re projecting 1.46m million cars for the whole of 2022. That would be 190k LESS than 2021 and the lowest annual figure for a very long time. As we’ve said before, this is more to do with supply then demand, but you can’t help asking if supply is going to improve in what’s left of this year?
We’ll have to wait 6 months (or a full year after covid) until we can see how accurate our fortune telling is, but we wonder how long this downward trend can continue?
The other key thing to note is that as recently at 2018, hybrids, PHVs and EVs accounted for only 5% of all cars registered. By 2022 this was 32%, with pure-EV contributing the most to the increase, pretty much reflecting the fall in diesel registrations.