Used car sales drop by 42%

THERE HAS been a 42 per cent fall in used car sales during the first four months of the year compared with the same period in 2008, according to new figures.

While the Central Statistics Office and the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) provide data on sales of new vehicles, this is the first time that the volume of used car sales, including private sales, has been published.

The data – compiled by car records checking firm cartell.ie – shows 240,604 second-hand cars were sold to the end of April compared to 413,039 during the same period last year.

It comes as the latest figures for new car sales show sales to May 31st are down 64 per cent, with 42,040 cars sold over the first five months, compared with 116,108 over the same period last year.

Jeff Ahern, director of cartell.ie said when the company was set up in 2006, there was no measure of used car sales in the State. The data was complied by monitoring changes in the “dates of sale” notified to the Department of Transport. It includes sales between private car owners and also between dealers. “If any car registration has a new date of sale registered, we count it. A new date of sale, by definition, means the car has changed hands.”

Cartell.ie has been accessing this data to help it assess the potential market for its checking services.

To put the data in context, there were 820,000 used vehicle sales in 2004, according to cartell.ie. “This is our market for car checking... If you look at the trends, once a car has one owner the rate of change follows a trend. However, if you look at cars with no previous owners, [new cars], they were the ones trading in against their new cars in January 2007, January 2008, but this year they didn’t.

“There is a direct co-relation between new vehicle sales and used sales. This year [owners] didn’t trade in their cars.”

One part of the market that is bucking the trend is used car imports. According to cartell.ie, the number of vehicles imported, particularly from the North and Britain, rose by 10 per cent during the first three months of the year, to 34,436.

SIMI director general Alan Nolan said the industry was under huge pressure and 14 dealerships had gone out of business in the last year. A liquidator was appointed to Dublin Volvo and Honda dealership Canavan Motors last week.

Nolan criticised banks for restrictions on business and said they were “adverse to normal business lending risk”. He said some 10 per cent, or 5,000, of those employed in the sector had now lost their jobs.