While last year the trend showed some improvement, the number of imported second-hand cars freshly registered in the country still outstrips that of new cars by more than 3:1, national news agency Agerpres reported. Last year 473,616 have been registered in Romania, down by 9% from the previous year.
The most popular used car brand remained Volkswagen with more than a quarter of the total, followed by Opel and BMW.
In terms of new cars, however, the registration those grew by 23.1% last year to 130,919 units, second only to Lithuania (24.5%) in the 28 member states of the European Union. More than one quarter of those were Romanian-manufactured Dacia vehicles (Dacia is owned by Renault), followed by Skoda, Renault and Volkswagen.
In contrast, in whole EU (excluding Malta) new car sales only grew by a marginal 0.1%, mainly due to the fact that manufacturers experienced difficulties in delivering enough engines that conform to the new WLTP (worldwide harmonized light vehicles test procedure) emission standards.
