JULY VFACTS: Aussies love cars

It's official: Australians are still in love with new cars – or should that be new SUVs? While the overall market grew by around three per cent for the month, the biggest growth was in the SUV segment. Again!

The big winners in July (year-on-year) were Mazda, up by 1308 vehicles, along with Volkswagen (+917) and Mercedes-Benz (+531). The big losers were Nissan (-514), Jeep (-631) and Holden (-1095). See the table below for more fast figures and graphs.

The most popular new car in July 2015 was the Toyota Corolla with 3573 units and the best-selling SUV was the Mazda CX-5 with 2223.

After June's impressive 100,000-plus new car registrations and suggestions that there had been significant 'pull forward' of demand, the local market recorded another decent increase in July. A total of 92,308 new car registrations were recorded, passing last year's July 'sales' of 89,865, a rise of 2.7 per cent.

Year to date, new car registrations are up 3.2 per cent, up by around 20,000 new vehicles to 670,735 sales to the end of July.

The biggest driver of this growth continues to be SUVs, up by 13.4 per cent for the month and 13.7 per cent year on year in Australia.

If the sales increases continue through the later part of 2015, this year will once again be a record one million-plus sales year.

Another reason buyers are increasingly looking at new vehicles are the influx of new utes. These utility vehicles have been selling strongly in Australia with a raft of new models such as the Toyota HiLux, Mitsubishi Triton and Ford Ranger working their way into the top 10 best-sellers list for July 2015.

July Top-10 models:
Toyota Corolla     3,573
Mazda 3               2,825
Hyundai i30         2,750
Toyota HiLux       2,579
Mitsubishi Triton 2,238
Mazda CX-5        2,223
Toyota Camry      2,124
Holden Commodore    2,030
Ford Ranger         2,013
Volkswagen Golf 1,675