The European motor industry remains under a lot of pressure as it attempts to recover from the downturn of 2008 and this applies equally to the new car markets and both the retail and wholesale used car sectors.

 Recovery in the new car market is critical to the overall health of European motor scene and 2011 to date has shared mixed messages. The new car market is still trying to establish some momentum in a post-scrappage scheme environment – a task that is proving quite difficult.

Most recent figures issued by ACEA suggest the new car recovery is patchy at best. While new passenger car registrations increased by 7.1% in the EU in May, figures for 2011 to date are still behind the same period last year, admittedly by less than 1%.

However, while May registrations were massively up in Germany (+22.0%), and showing positive growth in France (+6.1%) and Italy (+3.6%), the market contracted by 23.3% in Spain and 1.7% in the UK. That there can be such discrepancies in the five major markets underlines that economic confidence is fragile and that, of course, will always affect the sale of big-ticket items.

And looking at 2011 in total, it was the performance in the key new car markets of the UK (-7.3%), Italy (-15.1%) and Spain (-25.7%) that lead to an overall 0.8% downturn across the EU. In absolute figures, Germany and France registered over a million vehicles from January to May, followed by the UK and Italy, with over 840,000 units. Early figures for June suggest that even the strong German market is beginning to slow down, however.

Looking at the wider economic picture, conditions remain fragile at best and incredibly difficult at worst, with some markets operating under extremely challenging debt-ridden circumstances – Portugal and Greece have hardly had conditions conducive to selling expensive consumer items, while Ireland appears to be the next country in the sights of the debt-rating agencies – from Celtic Tiger to Mauled Moggy in a few short years.