MADRID, Sept. 2 (Xinhua) -- The sales of new cars and 4X4 vehicles in Spain fell by 30.8 percent year on year in August, according to figures published by the Spanish associations of car manufacturers (Anfac), car sales (Ganvam) and concessionaries (Faconauto) on Monday.
A total of 74,490 vehicles were sold during the month, with the 30.8 percent fall in sales, the biggest experienced in Spain during the month of August since the start of the last economic crisis in 2008, when a 41.27 percent sales drop was recorded.
August saw a reduction in sales in all sections of the market, with a 27.5 percent fall in purchases by private individuals, a 34.4 percent drop in the sales of company cars and a 36 percent reduction in purchases by car hire firms.
The data means that the first eight months of the year saw 9.2 percent fewer cars sold compared with the same period in 2018, with a total of 883,649 sales.
Part of the reason for the sharp decline in August is that August 2018 contained an extra working day and was also the last month before new emissions legislation came into effect, which led to higher than average sales for the month.
Anfac's Director of Communication Noemi Navas explained that the fall in sales in 2019 was "in line" with market tendencies, while Raul Morales, who is the Director of Communications at Faconauto, said there was still a "latent" demand for new cars and that many clients were delaying buying their purchases to hopefully take advantage of special offers in the last quarter of 2019.
Finally, Ganvam's Tania Puche insisted that August 2018 had been an "atypical" month in terms of sales, which made the figures for this August appear worse than they actually are.