Again in 2021, Italy will manage its largest domestic car population ever, despite low registration levels in 2020. The growing shares of new technologies is impactful at the moment due to low volume of registrations . Thanks to government incentives the volume of new technologies will become more robust and help boost the market recovery

The shares of new technologies are growing

In the last 10 years, more than 16 million new vehicles have been sold, this translates to roughly 50% of the current car parc. Of those, only 57,000 are BEV and 632,000 are PHEV. Therefore, by January 2021, 1.2% of the car population is PHEV and 0.2% are BEV. Significatntly, half of these were registrated in 2020 (32,000 in total).

The shares of new technologies are growing. For BEV, the share of new car registrations were 2.3% for 2020, and 2.1% in the first 3 month of 2021. For PHEV, the volumes are quite different: in Q1 2020, the share of these PCs was 18.0%, up to 29.8% in Q1 2021.

Most of the maintenance and repair market are wondering what will happen in the next 10 years regarding the technologies on the road (and in the workshop shop for service), as well as  what will be the investments in technologies to face the changes.

The recover pre-pandemic volumes

Taking into account a projection of the overall sales volumes for the next 10 years, and a scenario of how technologies will be split in the future, we planned the shares down to: 9% for Diesel and 17% for Otto technologies (including MH and LPG/NCG, a domestic niche). In this scenario, PHEV would grow up to 59% of the parc (now it is 29%) and BEV up to 15% from 3.2%. (this is an outcome from a range of possible scenarios). The shares are growing in an overall volume of new registration that will sharply recover pre-pandemic volumes (the volumes of the 1997-2007 era are gone in the wind).

Diesel and gasoline cars within the parc will quickly decrease

Diesel cars within the parc will quickly decrease, and petrol cars would slowly decline also. PHEV cars would grow significantly up to 21.2% of the car parc, reaching more than 7.1 million UIO.

BEV, for the time being still hidden by the horizontal axis line thickness, will emerge in the parc and peak up at 4.3% in 2030. This equates to roughly  1.5 million cars, considering the new registration scenario demonstrated.

For the workshops, it means there will be many changes in the way cars are serviced, but there is some time to get prepared, particularly for IAM players. If MH cars are not far from ICE car of the last generation, tension is 12-48 Volts, with the appropriate tools, you can do it! However, PHEV cars present a much more complex paradigm shift. Electronics is king (just a mention to the shortage of electronical components in the OEM in these recent weeks) and there are many ways to think the same technological scheme among the VMs’. Workshops will need more time to manage the cars, they will also need very specific tools and skills. For that, maintenance costs and lead-time would grow in the future assuming no improvements in productivity.