European Car Sales Drop 76% in April, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Hammered

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 19, 7:10AM EDT

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European Car Sales Drop 76% in April, Ford and Fiat Chrysler Hammered — © Thinkstock

Car sales in Europe imploded in April, down an extraordinary 76.3%. The drop was unprecedented and hurt the ambitions of two of America’s largest car companies. Ford Motor Co. (NYSE: F | F Price Prediction) and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles N.V. (NYSE: FCAU) were bloodied. The news was hard for Ford in particular. Its China sales have been in shambles for over a year, so it is in trouble in two of the three largest car markets in the world.

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The European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) reported: “In April 2020, registrations of new passenger cars in the European Union posted a year-on-year decline of 76.3%. The first full month with COVID-19 restrictions in place resulted in the strongest monthly drop in car demand since records began.”

Fiat Chrysler’s drop was breathtaking. Unit sales fell 87.7% to 10,419. Sales of its flagship Fiat brand fell 86.6% to 8,209.

Ford sales fell from 75.9% to 14,967. Ford’s sales in China dropped 26.1% last year to 567,854, months before the effects of the pandemic. Of the three large markets, Ford is only doing relatively well in the United States.

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The Ford restructuring, headed by CEO Jim Hackett, is almost certainly over before it started. The restructuring was meant to save $11 billion and to move Ford heavily into autonomous and electric vehicles. Ford will need to come up with both capital and a stable of new vehicles to complete its transformation. For the time being, that is not possible.

Incidentally, the nations hardest hit in April were Italy, where sales dropped 97.6% to 4,279, and Spain, down 96.5% to 4,163.

It is hard to imagine that, for the year, sales can come even close to recovering to 2019 levels.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.