Italy 2024. EV Adoption Struggles To Scale As Car Market Flatlines

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Toyota Yaris Cross 2021

Italian Car Market remained largely unchanged in 2024, with full-year sales down 0.5% to 1.558 million units. Toyota continued to grow, narrowing the gap with a struggling Fiat. The EV segment continued to struggle for market share, remaining below 6% of total sales despite gradual growth.

Market Trend and Outlook

In 2024, Italy’s economy is forecast to grow by 0.7% and accelerate to 1.0% in 2025, supported by rising consumption and RRP-related investments despite the phase-out of housing renovation tax credits. Inflation is projected to fall sharply to 1.1% in 2024 due to declining energy prices, before rising to 1.9% in 2025, driven by wage growth in the services sector. The unemployment rate is expected to drop from 7.7% in 2023 to 6.8% in 2024 and further to 6.3% in 2025, as labor market participation increases alongside nominal wage gains.

The government deficit is forecast to decline significantly, reaching 3.8% of GDP in 2024 and 3.4% in 2025, driven by robust tax revenue and reduced spending on energy price measures. However, public debt is set to rise to 136.6% of GDP in 2024 and 138.2% in 2025, reflecting higher interest payments and the lagged impact of past tax credits. Positive primary balances and stable net exports provide some support to overall economic stability.

Although Italy is steadily increasing EV adoption, it still lags behind leading European countries. In 2024, EVs accounted for only 5.6% of the Italian market, totaling 86,224 sales (+3.8%). This marks a slight increase from 2023, reflecting steady growth over the past five years but a lack of significant momentum.

Despite a 5.9% decline in year-on-year sales, Tesla remained the top-selling EV brand, followed by Audi and BMW. Notably, Volvo achieved remarkable growth of 305.8%, climbing 13 positions to secure 7th place, while BYD made significant strides, rising 18 positions to 11th, moving closer to the Top 10.

In line with the general economic outlook, the Italian car passenger market showed little movement in 2024, falling 0.5% and reaching 1.56 million units. The trend was confirmed in December, when sales dropped by 4.7% continuing a 5-months losing streak. 

Looking at cumulative data up to December 2024 brand-wise, the market leader Fiat continued to underperform the industry and lose market share, with 143,842 sales (-17.6%). Soon, we might see a new leader in the market, as Fiat seems likely to be overtaken soon. 

The new leader could be the current second, Toyota. Growing at a very fast pace, it grew 1 spot and totaled 122,932 cumulative sales (+24.6%). Volkswagen -down 1 spot- ranked 3rd with 121,204 sales (-1.3%).

In fourth place Dacia with 97,253 sales (+13.7%), followed by Renault -up 1 spot- with 87,136 (+7.7%) and Peugeot -up 1 spot- with 78,151 (-2.1%).

In seventh place BMW -up 3 spots- with 71,047 units sold (+17.4%) ahead of Ford -down 3 spots- with 68,705 sales (-15.9%), Jeep -up 1 spot- with  68,436 registrations (-4.2%) and in 10th place Audi -down 1 spot- with 67,808 (+1.3%).

Looking at the best-selling model ranking, deeply reported in the dedicated post, the Fiat Panda was still the market leader, as for the last 40 years, despite sales droppin 2.6% in year-on-year volume, followed by the Dacia Sandero (+26.2%) and the Jeep Avenger (+93.7%).

Medium-Term Market Trend

In the last decade the Italian market has had many ups and down. Starting at 1.8 million sales in 2010, it had 3 consecutive years of negative y/y sales with a minimum of 1.29 million reached in 2013. From 2014 up to 2019 the overall trend was positive, reaching a maximum in 2018 of nearly 2 million sales.

At the end of 2019 the Italian market was standing at 1.9 million sales, but with the pandemic in 2020 the market took a substantial hit, moving to the 1.4 million mark. This -27.1% drop marked the Italian auto-market for the following years.

Post-Covid hasn’t looked too good for demand in the Italian market. 2021 showed a slight sign of recovery (+8.9%) that faded away in the following year. In fact, 2022 totaled 1.32 million sales, the lowest of the decade and a 9.6% decrease from the prior year. Despite the overall downtrend, the market did grow in the last 5 months of the year and luckily the momentum continues going into 2023, that started very strong.

There are still some issues that the market will have to confront if it wants to recover from the fall of 2022: first of all the current European sentiment that is pushing more towards EVs  is putting negative pressure on demand; and secondly in the last year we have seen a disruption in the global supply chain caused by a lack of raw materials, in particular for microchip production, that has lead manufactures to increase overall prices.

In 2023 the market performed very well, with yearly sales closing at 1.57 million, 18.9% higher than the prior year.

 

Tables with sales figures

In the tables below we report sales for all Brands, top 10 Manufacturers Group and top 10 models.

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