We used Indicio to forecast passenger car sales for 2022 in the European Union and do not expect new car registrations to return to pre-pandemic levels this year.
Peaking in September 1986 with 1.15M new vehicles, passenger car registrations in the US have seen a continuous decline to reach a record low of 182.8K in April 2020. Simultaneously, the used car sales market has grown consistently with its size multiplied by 9 between 1992 and 2020, and this is also attributed to the recent boom caused by the pandemic. Supply chain disruptions and unavailable new vehicles have pumped the used car market more vigorously than ever before.
What can we expect for 2022?
We used Indicio to forecast new registrations from November 2021 to October 2022 and based our estimates on a pool of 17 time-series models, weighted according to best performances at each horizon. Our models trained on data between 1992 and 2014, and we tested their performances between 2014 and 2021.
These numbers may evolve throughout the year depending on new variants concerns, semi-conductor market recovery, electric vehicles, which may bring a fresh breeze to the market, as the current fleet will gradually be replaced by greener options.