Car sales market reopens with little appetite

The Portuguese Automobile Association (ACAP) says that despite the car sales market reopening, the public are showing little interest in buying new cars.

Car sales in the Portuguese car retail market continued to fall in May and the President of the ACAP, Hélder Pedro says that: “There is no confidence and clients have not reappeared” in an interview with Jornal Económico.
“You can feel a huge lack of confidence among consumers because of the current uncertainty, in relation to Covid-19, employment instability, an increase in unemployment and fears of a resurgence of the pandemic in September and October, all of this had meant that no one is buying cars.”
After the fall in sales seen in March by around 56.6%, April saw sales nosedive by 84-6% when only 3,803 new vehicles were sold in the entire Portuguese market.
Hélder Pedro says that if demand continues to be sluggish many car sales outlets will close by the end of the summer and the rest of the year. The ACAP president says that in order to save the sector the Government should cut taxes for the sector, such as reducing VAT to 13%.
“Unfortunately we were expecting a fall in car sales because the automobile sector is a weather vane for the economy. When there is a crisis on the scale of the Covid-19 crisis we are experiencing now, the car sales sector is one of the ones that is most affected” he adds.
“In this crisis we’re hearing a lot about the restaurant and tourism sectors and rightly so, but we can confirm that the car sales sector is suffering in a similar way,” he said.