Erin Baker: Is the UK car market in crisis?

It’s not a crisis, because the 15 per cent drop is from an all-time high last March, so, while new car sales are falling, overall the annual and monthly figures remain healthy. And it’s not an unexpected drop, because we all know that Brexit is having the knock-on effect of financial uncertainty among consumers, and we all know that the Government has taken away any incentive to buy diesel.

So, on the one hand, we have market stasis, with people holding fire while they wait to see what happens in terms of Brexit negotiations and on the other hand we don’t have enough public information or incentives to buy electric cars, hybrid or pure. It’s a toxic combination, with a resulting stagnant pool that is the British car park. Consumers are stuck.

That’s a rough overview of the combining micro trends. Then there’s the singular macro trend that acts as an umbrella over the whole affair: people are becoming less bothered about private ownership of cars. I heard two wealthy men in their sixties or seventies on a train into London the other day, discussing their classic car collections. It transpired neither of them owned a modern car – they both use car-sharing clubs and pick up a VW Golf when they need to go somewhere, paying by the hour. Neither of them fancied the hassle of owning a modern car or genuinely saw the need for one. And that’s two men born in the 1940s. Imagine how our Generation Ys and Zs feel about cars: the fuel debate is the least of the industry’s problems – product desirability, it seems to me, will increasingly become the problem. The car is no longer the status symbol it was, and teenagers no longer queue up to pass their driving test aged 17.

Which is a huge shame, because car makers are doing a fine job of building great-looking, hugely desirable cars round electric powertrains, which have a different set of chassis parameters: just look at the critical acclaim for the Jaguar iPace electric SUV. But it’s our generations clamouring for one: my children’s generation remains significantly mute over cars these days.

We’ll see. No one has a crystal ball: every OEM is, to a degree, sticking a wet finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing in any particular month. It doesn’t help when, out of the blue, the Government makes non-sensical tax arrangements designed to penalise drivers purely for political reasons. Manufacturers have to have an R&D thumb in every pie going – electric, hydrogen, car-sharing, autonomous – because, while they know which way they’d like to go, they have to react to public mood swings and political statements. It’s not a job I envy.