June Australian Vehicle Sales Winners and Losers

THE WINNERS

Winner: Hyundai

An eye-widening 6432 sales of the Hyundai i30 hatchback catapulted the Korean brand to its best month ever – 12,300. The smaller Accent contributed notably with 1772 sales (up 53% on last year), with the Tucson (1481) and Hyundai Santa Fe (1303) SUVs chipping in with healthy results. Hyundai is comfortably ahead of Holden in third place after the first half of 2016.

Winner: Kia

Hyundai’s sister brand is also enjoying a growth spurt – with last month’s sales up 41 percent on June 2015. Multiple key performers for June were the Sorento (+125% to 519 units), Sportage (+55% to 1203), Optima (+79%), Rio (+24%) and Cerato (+23%). Its market share has jumped from 2.9 to 3.6 percent compared to this time last year.

Winner: Posh SUVs

High-end SUVs continue to ride high in more ways than one. Bentley’s new Bentayga arrived in time to find seven buyers and increase the British brand’s sales by 50 percent for June. Audi’s Q7 jumped 99 percent for the month, while Land Rover sales increased 30 percent for June on the back of the Discovery Sport (+117%), Discovery (+43%), Evoque (+26%) and Range Rover (+21%). BMW’s smallest SUV, the X1, more than doubled last year’s June tally, with a 227% increase, and the coupe-style spin-off of the X3, the X4, was also a highlight with a 58 percent year on year increase.

Winners: Mazda and Subaru

Japanese brands both posted all-time record monthly results in June. Mazda already has three 10K-plus sales results under its belt in 2016, but June’s 12,455 was a new record month. Handily timed, too, to hold off a mammoth challenge for second spot by Hyundai (see above). The CX-3, CX-5 (with its own best result yet), and the 4x4 version of the BT-50 ute were instrumental in the result. Subaru’s performance was aided by a 52 per cent year-on-year increase for the XV SUV and the addition of the new Levorg wagon to the line-up.

Winner: Sports cars

Passenger car sales may be dropping (see Loser section) but Australians are still partial to a sporty model – especially if it costs less than $80,000. While the $80K+ and $200K+ mini segments were up in June, the Under-$80K mini segment – featuring models such as the Ford Mustang, BMW 2 Series, Hyundai Veloster and Mini Cabriolet – jumped 37 percent to make sports cars the most popular passenger car, SUV or ute segment at +23%.

THE LOSERS

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Loser: FiatChrysler

2016 continues to be a tough year for the Italian-US alliance. Each of its passenger car and SUV brands – Alfa, Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat and Jeep – registered negative June results of between 49 and 80 percent. Only the Fiat Professional commercial division could post growth, though even that was a fairly flat 2 percent.

Loser: Volvo

A winner only two months ago in April, though a 35 percent year-on-year slip demotes the Swedish brand for June. The S60 sedan (-91%), V40 small car (-43%) and XC60 SUV (-48%) all struggled. Volvo’s saving grace was its flagship SUV, the Volvo XC90, which posted 175 sales.

Loser: Passenger cars

It’s SUVs and commercial vehicles propelling the Australian market towards yet another record sales year. Passenger cars are down 4.5 percent – or by 2554 vehicles. Micro/light cars were the biggest-falling segment in June – down 28 percent

Loser: Lexus

While the German and British luxury brands revelled in strong June sales, Toyota’s posh brand recorded a 15 percent slump. It wasn’t helped by its NX and RX SUVs defying the generally upward trend for luxury-SUV sales by both recording negative figures (-12% and -20%, respectively). At least the bigger LX was up (+12.5%) and Lexus sales overall are positive (+8%).

Losers: Ssangyong and Proton

The Korean and Malaysian brands sold just 45 vehicles between them in June. Ssangyong had 28 of those but had the biggest percentage drop for the month (-78%).