True fleet market up 21% in France as diesel registrations stay strong

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The French true fleet market outperformed the rest of the EU-5 in October, with registrations up 20.8% to more than 43,000 units.

Paris skyline

True Fleet Market France rises by more than 20%

The figures from Dataforce mark the sixth consecutive month of growth and the highest rate of growth since December 2015.
Both the private market and special channels also saw growth, albeit not on the same level, with rises of 11.0% and 12.9% respectively, helping to push the total market to more than 176,000 registrations, outperforming Italy by almost 7,700 cars and becoming the second biggest market in Europe behind Germany for this month.

Within the manufacturers’ league table, Peugeot led the way with a share of 26.2% – the highest for the brand since September 2005 but also its highest volume ever in terms of absolute figures. The 3008 is currently the most popular model for company car drivers overall and the larger 5008 is already in 7th position. Dataforce also noted that the top nine fleet models overall in October show the dominance of French brands with the Peugeot 3008 in the top slot followed by the Renault Clio, Peugeot 208, Peugeot 308, Renault Megane, Citroën C3, Peugeot 5008, Renault Scenic and Citroën C4 Picasso.

Renault came second in the OEMs (up 16.6%) followed by Citroën (up 24.2%_. Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Ford (despite a remarkable increase of 64.6%) all kept their positions while Toyota (ninth; up 27.2%) and Nissan (10th; up 13.6%) swapped ranks.

Opel, Fiat and Volvo did not make it into the top 10 but saw growth of 15.2%, 26.8% and30.3% respectively.

Dataforce also noted how diesel registrations in France are taking less of a tumble than elsewhere in Europe. For October’s YTD, the share of diesel engines in True Fleets dropped by 3.9 percentage points. However this decrease is one of the smallest in Europe and from the EU-7 countries is only bettered by Italy’s drop of just 2.7 percentage points. Within the Top 10 brands, models equipped with a diesel engine represented 79.6% of all new passenger car registrations.

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Natalie Middleton

Natalie has worked as a fleet journalist for nearly 20 years, previously as assistant editor on the former Company Car magazine before joining Fleet World in 2006. Prior to this, she worked on a range of B2B titles, including Insurance Age and Insurance Day. Natalie edits all the Fleet World websites and newsletters, and loves to hear about any latest industry news - or gossip.