UK's true fleet market fell 4.8% in February, says Dataforce

The true fleet market for the UK fell 4.8% in February in an overall market which fell 0.3% to 83,000 registrations, says Dataforce.

Inside the true fleet top 10 manufacturers, the positive and negative growth was shared equally.

Ford recorded the largest amount of true fleet registrations in February, ahead of Vauxhall.

Volkswagen was third and it was Nissan in 4th that was the first to produce a positive growth of 9.9%. The next three positions went to Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi respectively with the Stuttgart OEM hitting +18.5%.

Toyota, Skoda and Kia followed, filling out the remaining three Top 10 places with +93.3%, +29.1% and +51.1% respectively.

Unsurprisingly the new C-HR contributed to Toyota’s success but it was undeniably the Aygo that supplied the most with a growth of 242.9% and taking 40.8% of Toyota's true fleet share.

While the UK predominantly prefers a manual transmission, the tide has perhaps started to turn somewhat towards automatic or semi-automatic transmissions, said Dataforce.

Technology has changed dramatically in the past few years with automatic transmissions now offering better fuel economy and lower CO2 emissions.

Since 2004, true fleet's automatic transmission share has more than doubled from 16.3% to 35.3% and while this is the average from some manufacturers it is far more pronounced.

In 2016 BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Mitsubishi and Mercedes-Benz all managed five-digit registrations with more than 62% of this volume coming from automatic or semi-automatic transmissions and while Porsche was highest with 97.5%, its volume was only three-digits.

Volvo customers also favour automatic but have a more even share of 53.3% while Telsa, Maserati and Lexus each achieved 100% with only automatic transmissions.

Dataforce says while Audi customers overall still favour manual transmissions, it isinteresting to note that four similar models that were defined opposites: for A4 (64.2%) and Q3 (57.4%) the majority of customers favour a manual while A5 (58.3%) and Q3 (83.9%) customers preference was automatic (83.9%).