The VW Golf is once again the best-selling car of the year in Germany. Despite a noticeable decline, the Wolfsburg compact car will not be dethroned in 2025 either. The SUV T-Roc, which competes in the same category, takes second place, and the medium-sized SUV Tiguan takes third place. Volkswagen therefore has the podium for itself. With nice growth, Opel’s Corsa small car was the first outside the VW Group to move up to fourth place. 2.86 million passenger cars were newly registered last year. So that turned out to be a bit of a disaster, but for a long time it had looked even bleaker. There was a final spurt in December, resulting in an annual increase of 1.4 percent. Of course, the raw registration numbers say nothing about the yield; there may have been various self-registrations in order to improve the statistics and to utilize the factories to capacity. As we all know, nothing is more expensive than empty capacity. The German automobile association VDA is predicting 2.9 million new registrations for the current year 2026. Because of the overall economic weakness, no noticeable recovery is to be expected.VW sells around 85,000 Golfs a year. In the electric car segment, the fresh Škoda Elroq is the rising star of 2025; the compact SUV found a good 25,000 buyers straight away. The ID 7 mid-range car from Volkswagen, which is available as a station wagon and sedan, remains absolutely number one among electricians. The thirteen Chinese car brands that appeared together had 63,712 new registrations in Germany and a market share of 2.23 percent. To put it into perspective: VW sells around 85,000 Golfs a year. The majority of Chinese sales went to the long-established MG brand with 26,479 new registrations and 0.9 percent market share, followed by BYD with 23,306 new registrations and 0.8 percent. In contrast to some others, we do not include the Volvo brand among the Chinese because we would view such a thing as sensationalism to support a narrative. Although Volvo has a Chinese owner, it still produces predominantly in its home country of Sweden. If we were to think otherwise, we would also have to write about India’s ambitions; as we know, Land Rover and Jaguar belong there under corporate law. 4.15 million passenger cars were built. Most brands are doing as expected on the German market. Volkswagen ends up in first place, followed by Mercedes-Benz and BMW. Tesla went surprisingly steeply downhill; the American electric car pioneer lost almost half of its sales. Škoda and Renault are making positive progress, while Kia and Peugeot, for example, have seen a severe downturn. The domestic production of vehicles is crucial for local jobs. The automotive industry association VDA reports that domestic production of passenger cars was slightly above the previous year’s level. 4.15 million passenger cars were built, two percent more than in the previous year. This means that production has remained at approximately the same level for the third year in a row. That’s not good news. In times before the corona pandemic, people had gotten used to volumes that were 15 to 20 percent higher. The same applies to exports. Combustion engines on offer again. Incoming orders are worrying. According to the VDA, domestic orders fell by 11 percent in December compared to the same month last year. The main reason for this is the weak overall economic situation. Orders from abroad are 8 percent below the previous year’s value. Where the journey is going is more uncertain than ever. Some manufacturers are bringing combustion engines back into their range, and some have even declared diesel units long since dead. The electric car still does not gain enough speed to meet the political requirements. Of course, purely battery-electric vehicles experienced a whopping increase of 43 percent to around 545,000 units. This means they achieve a share of new registrations of 19.1 percent, which is 5.6 percentage points more than in the previous year.More on the topicThe President of the importers’ association VDIK, Imelda Labbé, nevertheless warns: “New registrations of models with alternative drives rose again significantly in 2025. However, the share of battery-electric vehicles remains slightly behind the forecasts. Despite the product offensive, the overall market share was not yet sufficient to achieve the CO2 fleet limits.” According to reports, all manufacturers are particularly troubled by the continued rapid decline in the residual values of used electric cars, which threatens to blow up the leasing market, which is extremely important in this segment.
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