New Car Sales Recover to Pre-pandemic Levels

According to official Australian car industry rhetoric, new car sales are pretty grim, based on April results in isolation. But is it really that bad? Also, here comes China…

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New car sales in Australia are pretty grim. Or are they?

According to official Australian car industry rhetoric, looking at the results for April in isolation, it sounds dire. Essentially, the car industry is still paying the price for screwing computer chip manufacturers so firmly on price, then failing to see the pandemic trainwreck approaching, a couple of years ago.

Also, China is on the rise.

The public relations factory in Kingston, otherwise known as the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries (Toyota’s de facto PR agency in Canberra), headed up by Tony Weber, recently said:

Gosh, they must have short memories - April last year was a record  92,000 vehicles and change. Hip-hip-hooray. Obviously, 2020 was apocalyptic, with just 38,926 reported sales. Apparently there was a newborn pandemic back then. But 2019 was okay at 75,550 for April.

Just for completeness, April 2018 was 82,930, and April 2017 was 83,135.

So, as I see it, the headline is: April 2022 New Car Sales Recover to Pre-pandemic Levels. Double hooray.

But unfortunately, Tony Weber is up on stage with the FCAI’s colourful talent all depressed and upset that new car sales are not as exciting as they once were. Gotta have something to complain (and therefore lobby) about.

The only difference today being customers have been waiting a lot longer to get those cars. Deliveries are line ball with 2017, 2018, and 2019. And 2021 was a boom following a bust in 2020. It’s just now customers are waiting three-to-twelve months typically to get a car delivered - sometimes more. Because the car industry stuffed up monumentally on forward planning and on its negotiations with chip manufacturers.

More panic when in fact production is fine. It’s the backlog of orders that are the problem. There’s a queue, three to twelve months long of waiting customers. Production needs to ramp up, to historic highs, to shorten the queue. Otherwise, a proportion of those in the waiting room are going to say, ‘Stuff this.’ Deliveries are already back to pre-pandemic levels.

Still, nice try, attempting to paint your FCAI members (even the non-Toyota ones) as innocent victims here, when in fact they shot themselves in the bar graph.

Salient highlights from the most recent sales figures, which other alleged motoring journalism websites won’t tell you, because: trying too hard to be mates with the industry they report on, for platinum frequent flyer points and the advertising revenue.

The numbers do not lie. The unpalatable truth is that the median Australian new car buyer gives not a single care about environmental issues. Australia is happy to buy a big, heavy, CO2-belching tank, in favour of more climate-compatible transportation.

And carmakers are happy to sell such environmentally unfriendly vehicles to them. The marketers of cars only ever use the environmental, climate-conscious filter when they need to sell their hybrids and EVs to people. It’s textbook greenwashing hypocrisy. 

This is especially noticeable in Toyota. Just a fraction of ‘green utopia’ pages for its hybrids are far outnumbered by the pages devoted to its armada of lardy-arsed SUV and 4X4 armoured personnel carriers - also known as LandCruiser 200/300, Prado, Kluger and Fortuner.

The fact remains, the car business is at war with the ‘environment’ business. The best we can hope for is a treaty

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TOIL AND TROUBLE

Now, in the domain of the Shit Price Promise: Price-fixing by any other name, thanks to a loophole, abetted by the ACCC’s terrible narcolepsy. 

I’m looking at you, Three-prong and Honda, with all the respect due to businesses offering their customers the rock-solid certainty that you will pay the worst possible price for a Three-prong or Honda, henceforth. What a relief. That’s confidence.

Honda sales: about 40 per cent down, for the month of April, and the year to date. Honda has suffered a self-inflicted sales freefall, with progressive declines for four years now at this point, from almost 15,000 sales for April, year-to-date, 2019, dropping to just over 5000 for the same period this year. Well done.

No more Odyssey people mover, apparently, despite launching the updated model in January 2021.

They just killed the old barge Odyssey, quietly, in Australia, it seems. Certainly it’s no longer offered on the website. Kia must be thrilled, if only they could just get enough of those damn Carnivals built.

To put Honda in perspective, Toyota Corolla reported 7239 sales so far this year. Hyundai i30 reported 7924 - but the $47,000 Honda Civic, just: 263 sales in 2022. Same goes for the new HR-V which has tanked in sales - a small SUV, mind you. Go Honda, go.

Mercedes-Benz, Satan’s official carmaker, is ‘only’ down 20 per cent, so far this year. But it would be even more terrible for Mercedes-Benz Australia to remember back as far as April 2017, when they’d sold more than 12,000 cars for the same equivalent period, versus just over 8000 this year. Ultimately that’s 30 per cent fewer customers to mistreat, endlessly, into the future.

Back then, they were selling roughly 50 per cent more than BMW. But this year the gap has shrunk to just 16 per cent. There’s nothing Stuttgart hates more than a Bavarian coming up from the rear.

RESPECT CHINA

That insightful contribution from one of you, and to anybody playing into the war rhetoric - we cannot hope to win, against the manufacturer of, statistically, everything.

If you removed everything made in China from your life, you’d be sitting on a rock, amid virgin busted-arse cattle scrub, and you’d be nude.

In other words, Chinese-owned MG is suddenly a ‘top-10’ car retailer here in Australia. Somebody get the number of that bus. Essentially, if you’re not Toyota, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Kia, Hyundai or Ford, MG is on top of you, right now. Subaru, Nissan, Volkswagen, Honda, Jeep - that’s you.

Every other carmaker of EVs sooks about subsidies from Australian taxpayers, while MG just builds an electric SUV for $45K.

Just four years ago, year-to-date, April 2018, MG had sold 432 cars here in Australia, ranking it above automotive nobodies including Maserati, Fiat and Alfa Romeo, but not too many others. Same period this year: 16,040 cars. Call it 4000 per cent growth.

Hang on, wasn’t there a pandemic  in the middle? The FCAI keeps moaning on and on endlessly about something like that. According to them, for carmakers, it’s been a winter of discount tents nobody wants. 

All I can say is, MG must be doing something not-shit.

It seems MG is, more or less, poised to do to the current market leaders, what Hyundai and Kia did to the Japanese carmakers - in terms of fracturing their market share. But while it took the South Koreans about three decades to pierce the thick skin of commercial automotive convention, it seems MG is on track to repeat this history, but in about five years.

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