The SMMT has published the UK’s car production stats for July, and while they of course show a drop compared to the same month last year, they’re also a hopeful indicator for an industry still in crisis.
According to the figures production fell by 20.8% in July with 85,696 cars produced in total. Almost all factories are now open and are beginning to get to grips with new ways of operating, meaning that far more cars were produced in July than in June, whose figure was 56,594 – a 48.2% drop year-on-year.
So you see, it’s going in the right direction. At the start of this month the SMMT released new car registrations for July, which showed that sales rose for the first time in 2020, up by 11.3% on June. Still, at that point registrations were down by 41.9% year-to-date and it’s expected that by the end of 2020 the total number of cars sold will be 30% fewer than in 2019.
UK car production is down 39.7% overall, representing a year-on-year loss of 307,707 cars, and car exports from the UK are down by a similar number, falling 38.5% to 381,273 units.
SMMT chief executive Mike Hawes said, “As key global markets continue to re-open and UK car plants gradually get back to business, these figures are a marked improvement on the previous three months, but the outlook remains deeply uncertain.”
The effects of the slump in sales and production are already being felt across the industry, with MINI the latest manufacturer to announce that it’s cutting around jobs at its Oxford plant, as it moves from a three-shift pattern to two.
The SMMT is especially concerned about the impact that Brexit might have on a fragile industry Mike Hawes added: “With the sector now battling economic recession as well as a global pandemic, it has neither the time nor capacity to deal with the further shock of a ‘no deal’ Brexit. The impact of tariffs on the sector and the hundreds of thousands of livelihoods it supports would be devastating, so we need negotiators on both sides to pull out all of the stops to ensure a comprehensive free trade deal is agreed and in place before the end of 2020.”
Keyword: Car production ramping up post-lockdown, July figures show