What was the 5th Most Popular (or Common) Car in June 2012?
There is a fine line between common and popular. Popular can mean that big numbers of people see the virtues in something and choose to select it, common however can mean that just too many people chose it and because of that, the product loses cache and you see them everywhere.
There is however a 3rd way and it’s a road that Apple discovered with their iPhone over recent years, where the product that was originally a bit posh and a bit classy, became enormously common, but somehow, still managed not to just maintain the feel of being exclusive, but actually grew in desirability the more common it became.
Well that’s what the chaps in Bavaria have found with their BMW 3 Series as it was the UK’s 5th best selling car in June, which by any way of looking at it, makes it pretty common as 5,830 of the things hit the roads of the UK in just one month.
To put that into perspective, the cars that outsold the BMW 3 Series were Fiesta with 9,063 sold, Corsa with 8,800 sold, Focus took 6,937 sales and Golf came in with 6,311 happy new owners. Cars like Astra, Polo, Qashqai, Insignia, Mercedes C Class and fiat 500 were all trounced by the BMW.
Not stopping there, for the third month in a row, BMW as a car manufacturer were 4th in overall numbers of cars sold, with 14,302 beemers finding buyers, although market leader Ford sold 23,654, with 2nd place Vauxhall attracting 21,334 buyers and another German grabbed 3rd place as Volkswagen sold 17,121 vehicles.
The UK car market for June 2012 was up by 3.5% over the same month last year, totaling 189,514 registrations, whilst year to date for 2012 over a million cars were sold at 1,057,680 for the 6 months and that’s also up by 2.7% over the same first 6 months last year.
The other measure of how a car maker is really doing, is market share and that paints a slightly different picture with top player Ford, seeing its worst market share of the year at 12.5% and Vauxhall coming in at 11.3% and whilst its behind Ford and has been all year, it’s also down on last month. Third place Volkswagen was also down at 9%, but its in 4th place that BMW come in again and buck the trend with its share jumping from 6.3% last month to 7.5% in June.
One German that didn’t fair too well however was Audi who saw their worst market share of the year at 5.8% although year to date in total numbers, they still edge it over BMW at 66,005 sales to BMW’s 64,514 sales, putting Audi in 4th place overall year to date, one place ahead of BMW who sit in 5th.
Nissan showed how popular its product now is, taking 5th place in June and 6th overall for the year and cars like Juke and Qashqai have been largely responsible for that and that’s good news, because Nissan make more cars in the UK than any other manufacturer.
A quick run down of the other players “year to date” saw Peugeot 7th, Mercedes 8th, Toyota 9th, Citroen 10th, Hyundai 11th, Kia 12th, Skoda 13th, Honda 14th, Land Rover 15th, Fiat 16th, Mini 17th, Renault 18th, SEAT 19th, Volvo 20th, Mazda 21st, Suzuki 22nd, Chevrolet 23rd, Jaguar 24th and bringing up the rear, Lexus in 25th.
There is no getting away however from the fact that the big player is Ford. Its arguably got the most complete range and most of its pretty new stuff and that’s represented in it achieving a massive 14.2% chunk of the car market for the first half of 2012 and when you consider this is as much as the following 10 car makers sold between them, it shows you just how strong and just how popular the Ford product is as Fiat, Mini, Renault, Seat, Volvo, Mazda, Suzuki, Chevrolet, Jaguar, Lexus only achieved 14.5% “between them” and that’s just 0.3% more than Ford sold on its own.
So I guess, nothing really changes and it shows that when it comes down to it, for most of us, it’s the vehicle that matters and not a posh badge
