This budget hatch toppled Tesla to become Europe’s best-selling model

Table of Contents

instead claiming the mantle.

Shows 268,101 examples of the Dacia Sandero were registered during '24, up 14% on the previous year.

The Sandero, which starts from just €12,990 (~A$21,500) in France, was one of only two engines-only vehicles in the European top 10.

G'day, Overall, JATO Dynamics reckons the new-car market in Europe took a 0.9% leap, with 12,909,741 new vehicles zipped up across the 25 European Union states plus the UK, Norway, and Switzerland last year.

.

The model dropped to fourth place, plummeting 17 percent to 209,214 registration numbers. This was the biggest drop on the list of the top 36 best-selling vehicles.

Total increase of 215,715, up 17 per cent.

was the top-seller in Europe in 2022. This ended the 14-year run of the Volkswagen Golf being the best-seller.

While the Model Y came in fourth spot overall, it was still the bestseller in electric vehicles in Europe.

placed third with 78,032 registrations.

After a few years of steady growth, the electric vehicle market share dropped by 0.3 per cent to 15.4 per cent. That's a bit of a reversal of fortune from recent years, where annual sales growth ranged between 28 per cent and 107 per cent each year between 2019 and 2023.

JATO points out that there's a lack of clarity about incentives for EVs, along with concerns about their relatively low resale values and inadequate charging infrastructure, as the main reasons behind the decline in 2024 – something that might be reversed in 2025 as more affordable EVs hit the market.

Electric vehicles still had more market share than all other types of powertrains except petrol vehicles, which still make up around half of the market (48.4 per cent, with a 0.5 per cent increase in market share).

Hybrid-only motors caused the only increase in market share in 2024, up 1.9 per cent, making up 11.8 per cent of the total market.

Tesla was the 16th best-selling brand in Europe; Dacia ranked ninth (569,736 registrations, up 3 per cent).

The Germans at Volkswagen took the top spot with 1,354,966 vehicles registered – that's a one per cent increase – followed closely by Toyota with 916,522, which had a bumper 12 per cent rise, BMW with 770,249, an improvement of six per cent, Skoda with 757,000, an increase of 12 per cent, and Mercedes-Benz with 709,721, up a paltry one per cent.

Other key highlights from the JATO Dynamics data includes:

• Chinese-built cars outsold those made in Japan, the UK and Turkey, ranking them sixth in the sales list.
• SUVs represented almost 54 per cent of total registrations, with 6.92 million sales
• There's been a change at the top amongst major car brands. Kia and Ford have dropped out of the top 10 ranks.
• Nearly one in every couple of hybrids registered to the Department of Environment was either a Toyota or a Lexus vehicle.
• Tesla was outsold by Fiat, Lexus outsold Honda and BYD outsold Alfa Romeo
• Eighty-eight percent of cars registered in Norway were electric vehicles, a percentage ranking it the highest among the 34 countries included in the dataset.
• Serbia had the lowest market share for electric vehicles as a percentage, being 0.8 per cent

"Overall, when you consider the challenges facin' the European auto industry, the results for 2024 don't look too bad," said Felipe Munoz, global analyst at JATO Dynamics

In Australia, you'd expect other industries to've shown signs of a strong recovery by now, but sadly, there's not a lot of proof the automotive industry will go back to its normal self before the pandemic.

Higher car prices, the shift to working from home, cost-of-living pressures on wages and the development of alternative transport options are among the reasons why Europeans are no longer buying brand new cars.

JATO says Europe's car market has declined by nearly 2.9 million units since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in '20.