No End to Falling European Car Sales

PARIS — European car sales keep falling, and American automakers are among the biggest losers in the shrinking market, industry data showed Tuesday.

European Union new passenger car registrations slid 10.5 percent in February from a year earlier, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association said in Brussels. It was the 17th consecutive drop, with sales falling everywhere except Britain, where they rose 7.9 percent.

E.U. sales, at 795,482 cars, came in at the lowest recorded for the month of February since the records started in 1990, Quynh-Nhu Huynh, statistical director for the automakers’ association, said.

She noted that in February 1990, new car sales totaled 1.1 million — at a time when the European Union had just 15 members.

The euro zone crisis, and the government budget-tightening measures prescribed to combat it, have hurt demand. Record unemployment has squeezed household budgets and left consumers reluctant to upgrade older models, and much of the younger generation lacks the means to purchase their first cars.

“Unless there’s a turnaround in the middle of the year, we appear to be headed for the worst performance ever,” Ms. Huynh said.

American automakers bore much of the brunt. General Motors’ European sales slid 20.1 percent, while Ford Motor recorded a 20.8 percent drop.

The European market sales of Volkswagen, the largest E.U. automaker, fell 7.2 percent, while the region’s No.2 carmaker, PSA Peugeot Citroën, fell 13.2 percent. Sales of Fiat, the Italian carmaker that controls Chrysler, fell 14 percent. Honda Motor led a handful of companies that posted gains, with its sales up 15 percent.

Ian Fletcher, an analyst at IHS Automotive in London, said that G.M., Ford, Fiat and Peugeot faced similar problems, with luxury carmakers reaching down to take their sales in a declining market, and cheaper models gaining at the bottom of the market.

“It’s the squashed middle market,” he said. “They’re facing pressure from the top of the market, from Mercedes and BMW, and pressure at the low end from the likes of Kia, Hyundai and Dacia.”

The U.S. carmakers, he said, are also suffering relative to other companies because they were less willing to offer buyer incentives, and were unable to match some rivals, particularly Volkswagen, on financing terms.

Mr. Fletcher said he expected car sales to grow this year in the United States, as well as in fast growing economies like China, Brazil, Russia and India.

He predicted that the European Union market, which shrank by 8.2 percent last year, was set for another 2.6 percent contraction this year, to around 11.8 million units.

There is hope, he said, that sales might bottom out before long, with gradual improvement possible by the end of the year. But with the monthly data as bad as they have been so far in 2013, he said, analysts might be looking at their forecasts again “in the next few months” for a possible downward revision.