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March VFACTS sales: Holden shoots to No.10 with a bullet

Aussie brand slumps to its worst result on record as March’s new-car sales hit a new high.

05 Apr 2018 12:37 PM

Barry Park

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HOLDEN has plummeted to number 10 on the list of Australia’s best-selling brands in March, its worst result ever, the latest VFACTS data shows.

The brand (5116 sales) was outsold by rivals keen to pull in big numbers as they headed into the last month of the Japanese financial year, including Honda (5586), Nissan (6191) and Subaru (5195) – and even lost out to German premium brand Volkswagen (5137). Yep, pick up your jaw.

The monthly sales results, released today, show Toyota cornered 18,887 sales representing a 17.6 percent share to once again dominate a market that still has plenty of fizz in it. March’s combined sales totalled 106,988 units, a 1.5 percent gain on the same month last year. The strong result has helped push the overall market up by 4.4 percent compared with the first three months of 2017.

Chasing the Corolla, which swaps over to an all-new hatchback in August, were the Mazda 3 (2780, and a much truer representation of private buyers’ tastes) and the Hyundai i30 (2719) that displaces last month’s No.3-ranked Mazda CX-5 (2261). Another SUV, the Nissan X-Trail (2504), rocketed up the charts to claim the fifth position.

MORE Holden slumps in February’s new car sales race

Ducking back to the brands for a moment, Ford looks like it is settling in to the No.5 slot as sales of the Mustang (705) kick up a gear again to dominate the affordable end of the sportscars segment. It also just about doubled sales of the EcoSport compact SUV (137). The ASX’s strong result helped Mitsubishi (8810) claim third spot ahead of Hyundai (8443), which failed to capitalise on the market’s strong SUV-flavoured undercurrent.

In the battle of the premium German brands, Mercedes-Benz (3340 sales) is prospering with the A-Class (605), GLA-Class (401) and GLC-Class (431) to comfortably outstrip Audi’s (1860) heavy lifters including the A3 (338), Q5 (438) and Q7 (205), and BMW’s (2229) 1 Series (254), 3 Series (275), X1 (109), X3 (626) and X5 (242). They all easily thumped Lexus (863 sales), with it relying on the IS (129), NX (321) and RX (229) to pull in the numbers. Infiniti? It logged only 43 sales for the month, which were dominated by the Q30/QX30 pair (13) and the Q50 (18).

There were some significant wins among the more recent arrivals in March. Alfa Romeo’s Stelvio – its first SUV – has given the premium Italian brand a huge lift, adding 51 sales to its 133-sales tally for the month, and helping to push the brand 50 percent higher than where it was at the same time last year.

BMW also experienced a bump via its new X2 (81 sales), making it the most successful of the coupe-profiled SUVs scattered throughout the German luxury car maker’s showroom. Jaguar’s pioneering E-Pace found 101 buyers, almost doubling the Brit’s monthly sales, while reborn Chinese brand MG found 99 customers willing to jump behind the wheel of the ZS small SUV.

And in a surprise result, Honda squared off its 2017-18 books by selling off two of its $420,000 hybrid-engined NSX supercars, making our count of the number sold here since its launch to … four. That’s a 100 percent gain.