Swiss Fleet Market Ends 2019 with Positive December

The Swiss fleet market continued to see growth to round out 2019 after experiencing declines earlier in the year, and posted a 22% growth in December.

Because of successes seen later in the year, true fleet registrations for 2019 were only 0.9% down on the previous year, said Dataforce. Meanwhile, registrations of light commercial vehicles grew even more strongly, up 41.9% in December.

All the top 15 importer brands were able to benefit from the once again positive development of the true fleet market, with Tesla, Subaru, and Porsche realizing the largest of these increases for December. The top three brands for the full year 2019 were Volkswagen, Skoda, and BMW. As in the previous year, the most popular fleet model with almost 4,750 registrations was the Skoda Octavia (up 15.3%) ahead of the VW Tiguan (down 0.3%). With cumulative growth of 20.6%, the SEAT Leon followed in third place. The Tesla Model 3 was ranked fifth favorite of Swiss fleet operators, making it the first vehicle in the model ranking not to come from the Volkswagen Group.

While exactly the same number of vehicles were registered in the private market as in the same month of the previous year, commercial registrations grew by a whopping 48.9% in December, with the true fleet market growing by 9.0%. For the channel of company cars, this represents a cumulative plus of 2.1% in 2019.