9:04 am, April 5, 2013
FORD’s Fiesta remained the best selling car in March, according to the SMMT.
The supermini remained at number one in the charts last month, with 22,748 units registered in the month, and 34,309 year-to-date.
Second was Vauxhall’s Corsa with 16,169 units – jumping Ford’s other popular seller, the Focus, which managed 15,434 registrations.
The Volkswagen Golf and Vauxhall Astra fought it out for fourth and fifth place, with 9,978 and 9,559 registrations respectively, while the Qashqai came fifth with 8,465.
The Volkswagen Polo and BMW 1 Series were next, with 7,431 and 7,001 units, while the Peugeot 208 and Mercedes C-Class finished the list with 6,726 and 6,628 registrations respectively.
Petrol models once again took a lead over their diesel siblings – with 202,249 petrol-powered cars registered to diesel’s 187,239, marking an 8.7 per cent increase for green-pump models compared with the same time last year.
Diesel models did also see an increase, up 3.2 per cent, but their market share dropped to 47.4 per cent last month – a few percentage points down on March 2012.
News wasn’t so good for alternatively-fuelled vehicles, however. 5,318 AFVs were registered last month – a drop of around 1.9 per cent on 2012 – and the segment’s market share fell slightly, now 1.3 per cent.
Private car registrations had the biggest increases, seeing a jump of 7.8 per cent, though fleet and business registrations also increased – up 3.7 and 5.5 per cent respectively.
Market share for business registrations held its position at 4.8 per cent, while fleet lost out to private slightly – now making up 43.5 per cent of registrations to private’s 51.7 per cent.
