BMW i3, Mercedes S-Class, GLA vie for honours - “We foresee a real recovery at long last but this will be a very slow, very modest change of direction”

New electric cars and hybrids will grab the headlines at the forthcoming Frankfurt Car Show, but doubts over the strength of any upturn in the industry will be keeping corporate strategists awake at nights as the sales slide looks likely to be replaced by stagnation.

In July, according to AID’s exclusive figures, car sales in Western Europe rose 4.4 per cent to 953,800, prompting some premature euphoria suggesting the dark days were at last over. 

But this simply called a halt to the precipitate decline, and sales in the first seven months of 2013 were still down 5.3 per cent at 7,011,300. ...more