Dacia’s strong selling Duster helped it to gain more sales growth than any other established brand in Europe in the first half of the year.
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A car company nobody in the US has ever heard and another one everybody has heard of have emerged unscathed from Europe’s first-half automotive bloodbath.
While Tesla defied predictions by BMW’s director of development that BEV demand in Europe was “bullshit”, Romania’s budget Dacia brand dominated the green-ink area of the sales growth sheets.
Research from automotive analyst JATO shows Dacia, Tesla and French brand Citroen as the big market share winners in the first half of the year, amongst a great, big pile of losers.
Lead by its compact SUV Duster with 21 percent growth, the Renault-owned Dacia brand saw its market share grow from 3.24 to 3.73 percent of the European market.
Dacia’s registrations jumped 12 percent from 280,500 cars to 312,900, which seems more impressive because it was achieved in a market that fell by 3.1 percent.
The Tesla Model 3 helped it to sell more than 45,000 cars in Europe so far this year.
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Tesla, the exact opposite of Dacia’s quiet-achiever status, rode the entry of the Model 3 to the market to climb from 0.16 percent of the market to 0.54 percent.
It sold 45,400 cars for the first six months, which is a sustained leap from a brand that sold just 6800 cars in Europe three years ago, according to JATO’s figures.
The Model 3 lowered the richness of the model mix, though, claiming 83 percent of that total and, with 37,500 sales, outselling the German premium mid-sized sedans in June.
Citroen, Seat and Mitsubishi also used growth in their SUVs and crossovers to fill out the top five places in growth in Europe this year.
The other end of the sales tables made for ugly reading.
Nissan saw 26.9 percent of its market share wiped out in Europe, while Volvo, which lost 22.5 percent, wasn’t far behind.
Fiat shed 17 percent of its market share, Volkswagen dumped 13.8 percent and BMW fell 10.6 percent.
It didn’t stop there, with red ink covering household names from Mercedes-Benz to Renault, Peugeot to Ford, Audi to Skoda and from Land Rover to Hyundai.
