How has the car market changed by months in 2019 - 2021?

In April of 2021, the market volume of new passenger cars in our country was 169.7 thousand units, according to the agency "AUTOSTAT". Is it a lot or a little? We decided to see what the dynamics of the Russian car market by months for the previous 3 years. The traditionally "low" month - January - was slightly better this year than January 2019 - 97.1 against 94.4 thousand units. But still, this result does not reach the volume of January 2020, when almost 105 thousand new passenger cars were bought in Russia.

In February (111.5 thousand units) the market felt better than in 2020 and 2019 (110.1 thousand and 97.6 thousand units, respectively). But in March, the trend changed dramatically: due to the collapse of the ruble in early spring 2020, there was a stir on the market. Fearing the impending rise in prices and the upcoming pandemic, the Russians began to buy new cars that were available at that time. Because of this, the market volume grew to 160.6 thousand units, which is almost 30 thousand higher than the level of March 2019 (130.9 thousand units).

This year, the market actually returned to the "pre-COVID" level (2019), exceeding it by 7 thousand units. April 2020 clearly showed how much quarantine measures have affected the new car market - its volume has decreased by almost 3 times in compare with April 2019 (54.5 thousand versus 152.2 thousand units). So it would be more correct to compare April 2021 with April 2019. But even in this case, this year's figure is a record for the reporting period - almost 170 thousand new sold cars, which is 17.5 thousand higher than in 2019.

As for the results for 4 months, Russians bought 516.2 thousand cars in 2021, and this is 20% and 9% higher than in the same period in 2020 and 2019, respectively.