The employers’ association of the dealers does not anticipate a recovery of the automotive sector for the next financial year. From Faconauto they believe that the situations that have been influencing vehicle sales in 2022 they will not be overcome in the short termmainly the problem of supply, due to lack of stock that has been conditioning the activity of dealers.
According to the president of this business organization, Gerardo Pérez, the forecast of closing this year with a figure from 820,000 to 830,000 units registered, depending on how the statistics evolve in the remaining business days of December. Until the 18th, the market fell 28%, with 46,416 units posted.
Its forecasts do not contemplate a change in trend in the automotive market for 2023 and it forecasts that registrations in Spain will only grow by 5% compared to this year, remaining at around 870,000 units. This uncertain scenario could improve slightly, an additional 10%, if the bottlenecks in vehicle production are somewhat solved, and thus reach 960,000 registrations.
During the traditional Christmas meeting with the media, those responsible for the dealership association predicted that the price of fuel and of the vehicles themselves will be circumstances that will continue to mark the future of the market. Similarly, the current context of high inflation, rising interest rates and household uncertainty will continue to weigh on the Spanish people’s capacity to consume, particularly penalizing registrations for the fourth consecutive year.
Gerardo Pérez has assessed the future Sustainable Mobility Lawwhich the Government approved and sent to the Cortes on December 13, as a new opportunity to get out of the stagnation that our country is suffering in the development of the electrification of the park “and integrate the private vehicle into a mobility and transport strategy more broad and ambitious, which Spain lacks».
In this sense, he considers that the Government should “recover the initiative and work with the car to implement public policies that avoid the current halt in the electrification of mobility and seek solutions to the strong market crisis. Without these measures, the employers have warned, the competitiveness of the sector is seriously endangered and a dynamic of job loss can be entered into.
Specifically they ask that the necessary levers are activated to save “the enormous lack in publicly accessible electric charging infrastructure and the inefficient management that is being made of the funds allocated to the purchase of zero-emission vehicles.”
In addition, they consider that the fact that Spain does not have effective taxation in terms of mobility could have a negative impact on the future application of the Law.
In this line, Faconauto has requested that sustainable mobility is linked not only to electrification, but also to the decarbonisation of the fleet, for which reason it has proposed that the current design of incentives for zero-emission vehicles be complemented with others for the acquisition of new and used vehicles up to one year old, taking into account account CO2 emissions and environmental label.