True fleet registrations in the UK fell 4.8% to 30,967 units in February, latest figures from Dataforce show.

True fleet registrations in the UK fell 4.8% to 30,967 units in February.

The decline came as total new car registrations fell 0.3% to 83,000 units while private registrations were down 4.4%.

The top 10 list of true fleet manufacturers saw some fluctuations. Ford took the top spot for the fifth month running, followed by Vauxhall, VW and Nissan – with the latter the first in the top 10 to see positive growth, with registrations up 9.9%. Nissan was followed by Mercedes, BMW and Audi respectively with latter up +18.5%. Toyota, Skoda and Kia filled out the remaining three top 10 places with +93.3%, +29.1% and +51.1% respectively. In the case of Toyota, the new C-HR play a role in its growth but the Aygo was the main success story, with growth of 242.9% and taking 40.8% of Toyota true fleet share.

Dataforce research also showed a changing trend in take-up of automatic or semi-automatic transmissions, driven by improvements in technology and fuel economy/CO2 emissions.

As a result, the market share taken up by automatic transmissions has more than doubled since 2004 from 16.3% to 35.3%. In particular BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mitsubishi and Mercedes all managed five-digit registrations in 2016, with over 62% of this volume coming from automatic or semi-automatic transmissions.

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