The new year opened with a heavy drop in car registrations, with 726,491 units sold all across Europe in January (-24.0%), about 230 thousand less compared to January 2020. This was mainly due to the new restrictions introduced by most governments to contain the COVID-19 emergency.
Looking at the main national markets, Spain posted the worse performance (-51.5%), followed by Germany (-31.1%), Italy (-14.0%, with 134,001 cars registered, nearly 22 thousand less than in the same month last year) and France (-5.8%).