INDICATA Market Watch: Alternative powertrain stock levels rise alarmingly

Alternative powertrain stock levels rise alarmingly

Despite being one of the strongest markets in Europe for used hybrid and BEV sales the Dutch market appears to be struggling with a huge surplus supply of both. Online B2C used stock levels of hybrids accounted for 16.76% of all stock going into March 2023, a 36.6% increase in just six months. Used BEVs are seeing an even bigger rise, going up 79.9% in six months as they represented 8.24% of March 2023 online B2C used stock.

Why this is such an issue can be seen in sales where the used hybrid 15.0% market share of February sales is only a 19.8% increase over six months prior. BEV sales were just 4.84% of the February market which is just a 9.5% increase over the same period.

With stock levels rising much faster than sales it is inevitable to see both powertrains are taking longer to sell with used BEV Market Days’ Supply soaring to 131 days going into March, whilst used hybrids increased to 87 days. This is quite a considerable change of circumstances considering they were the fastest-selling powertrains just over seven months ago.

The mix of cars by age has not changed much over the last couple of years with cars over 5-years-old taking 48.36% of the February market and cars under 2-years-old taking 31.28%, both of which are absolutely in line with the average trend over the last 24 months.

Despite this stability in the age of cars being sold it is not the same story with stock of cars under 2-years-old falling from 38.69% of the online B2C total stock at the start of April 2021 to 32.2% in September 2022. Since then stock levels of these younger cars have started to rise and going into March, they are back at 38.87%.

Part of the reason for this increase in the amount of stock of cars under 2-years-old appears to be manufacturer-backed tactical registrations in February 2023 which were 12.79% up year-on-year.

Our online B2C used car retail price index is based on a consistent pool of vehicles indexed against January 2022 and would normally see a lifecycle driven downward curve in average prices. Average prices for the market continue to ease down with the prices going into March dropping 0.1 percentage points month-on-month, leaving them just 3.5pp above January 2022 and 6.5pp above December 2021.

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Background

On the 24th of March INDICATA published its first White Paper “COVID-19 To what extent will the used car market be affected (and how to survive)?”. This document explored:

    Early market trends - Initial impact of the virus and the social distancing measures implemented.
    Market scenarios – A range of impacts based on infection rate development and historical market data.
    Mitigation – Risk assessment by sector coupled with potential corrective actions.

We committed to keeping the market updated with live data, volume, and price, to keep abreast of the fast-moving environment.

As such we are pleased to announce “Indicata Market Watch”.

How do we produce our data?

Indicata analyses 9m Used Vehicle adverts across Europe every day. To ensure data integrity, our system goes through extensive data cleansing processes.

The Sales (deinstall data) in this report are based on advertisements of recognised automotive retailers of true used vehicles. As such, it does not include data related to private (P2P) advertisements.

Where an advert is removed from the internet, it is classified as a “Sale”.

Appendix

INDICATA Market Watch March 2023 (The Netherlands)
INDICATA Market Watch March 2023 (Europe)