European Car Market Shows No Sign of Recovery

Year-on-year sales reports show that Europe's automotive industry followed the trend set by the US crisis driven market and sinked by 26 percent last month. Although not as battered as its American counterpart, Europe's market is starting to see the effects of foreign company policies. The acceptance of GM's survival plan could make the difference for their European subsidiaries and could mean unemployment for thousand of workers.

"Nobody in the industry is surprised at what we're witnessing across the European market, but in the cold light of day, the raw figures do paint a very bleak picture," David Di Girolamo, head of JATO Consult was quoted as saying by just-auto.com.

There was the occasional boost of both morale and finance over the past months. Just to name one, Germany has came up with an incentive that helped the local market breathe again. Even if the primary recipient of the incentive was the French manufacturer Renault, who's Romanian made model Logan sales increased by a factor of 12, the scrap bonus showed that Europe's market can get through this. But so far it is not enough.

Some fear the European Union market is heading straight towards protectionist policies. We are again forced to name France, or at least its President, who said he wants to “stop out-sourcing and if possible in-source” in order to prevent French money from exiting the country.

France was the least affected country by the downturn. It only registered a 7.9 percent drop, insignificant compared to the 88.1 percent crash of Iceland's market. In terms of sales, none of the top ten Europe car manufacturers didn't register increased sales in January.