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Used car sales in Ireland, at least those of indigenous Irish cars, are falling, according to new figures from Cartell.ie. The vehicle history and data expert have found that sales of used cars in Ireland fell by 3.8 per cent in the first two months of 2019, a decline of 6,765 sales. That comes off the back of a 4.8 per cent rise in used imports in 2018.
It's actually part of a two-year long trend of falling used car sales in Ireland, as consumers switch in ever greater numbers to used imports from the UK, raking in the benefits of the fall in the value of Sterling.
April and October last year saw strong growth in used car sales volumes, but according to Cartell.ie, that wasn't enough to produce a positive figure at the end of the year. The overall fall in used car sales in 2018 was 1.8 per cent, which oddly was exactly the same percentage fall seen in 2017.
Some of the volume in October can be explained by car makers and dealers desperately registering new cars that would not comply with the then-new WLTP emissions regulations in September, and then selling them off as 'nearly-new' used stock in October.
Used imports accounted for 21.9 per cent of all used car sales in 2018, up from the figure of 20.6 per cent the year before. Cartell.ie reckons that, by the end of this year, we'll have seen an overall fall in used car sales of around 3.5 per cent. The peak in used car sales was 2016, which saw 945,000 cars change hands, but it has declined every year since. With used imports continuing to rise, and no sign of a conclusion to the torturous Brexit process (which weighs heavily on the value of Sterling versus the Euro) it seems unlikely that there's going to be a reversal of this process any time soon.