Austrian Car Market marked its third straight year of growth, climbing 6.1% to 253,795 units. While the EV segment slipped 0.6%, BYD bucked the trend, jumping 10 spots to secure 3rd place.
Market Trend and Outlook
Austria’s economy will remain in recession in 2024, with GDP shrinking 0.6% due to weak consumption, high rates, and falling investment. Growth is expected to rebound in 2025 and 2026 at 1.0% and 1.4%, driven by recovering exports, rising real wages, and easing financing conditions. Inflation has eased from 7.7% in 2023 to 2.9% in 2024 and is projected to fall to 1.7% by 2026 as energy prices stabilize and wage pressures moderate.
Unemployment is set to rise slightly to 5.3% in 2024 before declining to 5.0% by 2026 as growth picks up. The construction sector is expected to recover from a two-year slump in 2025, supported by monetary easing and housing stimulus. The government deficit will rise from 2.6% of GDP in 2023 to 3.6% in 2024, peaking at 3.7% in 2025, with public debt exceeding 80% of GDP by 2026. Structural reforms, including increased female workforce participation and climate-focused policies, will support the recovery, while fiscal pressures gradually ease.
The EV segment struggled in 2024, growing just 1.3% year-over-year and breaking a four-year streak of strong momentum. EVs made up only 14.7% of total car sales, reflecting the slowdown.
Tesla stayed on top of the EV rankings but saw an 8.8% decline in sales. BYD impressed, jumping 11 spots to claim 3rd place, while MG and Volvo also delivered notable gains further down the list.
Austria’s overall car market defied economic headwinds, growing 6.1% year-over-year to 254,795 units. Despite mixed results earlier in the year, the market gained traction in the final quarter, finishing on a strong note.
Medium-Term Market Trend
The Austrian car market in the last decade hasn’t performed amazingly, reaching the all time high back in 2011. In the following year began a 3 year downtrend that would take sales form the peak of 376,628 to a low of 302,808 in 2014. The trend was reversed in 2015 but the 3 year growth that would follow couldn’t bring sales back above the all time high. In fact by the year 2018 sales started to drop again taking new car registrations back down to 310,896 by the end of 2019.
The arrival of the pandemic brought the European markets to a halt, due to the restrictive policies imposed by Governments all over Europe. Subsequently the Austrian car market fell 21.3% to the lowest level of the decade at 244,532.
In 2021, as for nearly all European countries, was a year of recovery and in the case of Austria sales remained quite stable, rising only 0.7%. In 2022 the market broke the resistance and fell 10.3% to 215,049 cumulative sales. A combination of factors are behind the current industry struggle: the disruption in the global supply chain caused by a lack of raw materials, in particular for the production of microchips and Governments push towards Evs, an expensive alternative for low income consumers.
In 2023 the Austrian Auto Market registered 239,106 units, growing 11.2% from previous year.
Tables with sales figures
In the tables below we report sales for all Brands, top 10 Manufacturers Group and top 10 models.
