New car sales sweep: how our predictions fared

We've traded in our crystal ball for something much more reliable – like a divining rod. At the start of last year we consulted the crystal ball to predict sales for some major new releases in 2017. Our trust was misplaced however, with few of the projections from that story becoming reality.

Let's start with the Alfa Giulia. In January last year we predicted Alfa Romeo could sell as many as 1500 units of the mid-size sedan. With so much hype surrounding the car, that seemed like a conservative number against a backdrop of nearly 4000 BMW 3 Series sold the year before.

But there was an unexpected wrinkle in the way the story panned out. Alfa Romeo had declared its hand up front, informing the media it had pre-sold the entire first-year allocation of Giulia for Australia. That first year's allocation was apparently 639 units, going on VFACTS registrations for 2017. Maybe supply for the Giulia will improve in 2018...

Moving on to the Audi Q2, we were closer. We speculated that the Q2 might outsell the A1 by 500 units and could cannibalise sales from the Q3 as well, for a total sales figure of 2500 units in 2017.

Well, the Q2 did outsell the A1 by over 500 units, and given Q3 sales slid backwards in 2017, presumably at least some of those sales were lost to the Q2. But 500 sales more than the A1 counted for little when the A1's sales declined by nearly 800 units. Audi sales were down across the board, in fact, and the Q2 sold just 1999 cars for the year.

Holden has high hopes for its Equinox, but it's too early to say how well it will sell. We predicted that the replacement for the Captiva could sell roughly 3000 units due to initial demand, settling down to a thousand units a month subsequently. The Equinox has only been on sale properly for the month of December. A small number of cars (73) were registered in November for dealer demonstrators and press vehicles. In December, Holden sold 679 cars – versus 818 of the Captiva in runout. The Captiva sold 9588 vehicles in 2017, so we still feel a thousand units a month of the Equinox can be achieved.

Hyundai's Genesis G70 is another late arrival. The mid-size G70 is yet to go on sale, Hyundai having pushed out the on-sale date to later this year. We predicted a thousand sales from local launch, with demand settling down to between 150 and 200 units a month. The Kia Stinger sold around 170 units a month over the last quarter of 2017, but was supply-constrained. Whether Hyundai can come close will depend on how the car is received by the public and how it's marketed by Hyundai. And once again, if it too is supply-constrained, that will have some bearing on early sales.

For the Kia, we predicted somewhere between 2000 and 3000 sales, but the Stinger's supply constraints resulted in a two-month waiting list and the importer has only committed to high-profile marketing activities for the car from the start of this year. At 200 units a month, our projection looks more or less on track – but for 2018, not 2017.

Our carsales.com.au car of the year, the Land Rover Discovery, has come nowhere near our forecast of 3000 units for the new, fifth-generation model. In fact, total sales of Discovery in 2017, including the run-out Discovery 4, amounted to just 1670 vehicles. That was nearly 900 fewer sales than in 2016. It seems like Land Rover successfully ran out all their stock of Disco 4 long before the new model arrived – and when it did arrive, the award winner was shipped here in a trickle, not a flood.

Total sales (or registrations, in fact) for the Maserati Levante topped out at 429 units for the full 12 months of 2017 (plus seven more registered at the end of 2016). This was in line with what the importer had said all along – that the Levante would be supply-constrained for the first year to 600 units for Australia and New Zealand combined. The importer had also anticipated the SUV would account for 40 per cent of Maserati sales here, but with sales decline for the brand's passenger car lines, the Levante actually reached nearly 60 per cent of sales in Australia for the year.

We predicted the Renault Alaskan (pictured in concept form, top) would sell perhaps 2000 vehicles before year's end in 2017. That was based on an on-sale date sometime during the second half of the year. But the Navara-based light commercial is yet to go on sale in Australia. Much like the Alfa Giulia, continuing the Northern polar theme, the Skoda Kodiaq just didn't sell in the numbers we expected it might. For 2017, we predicted the Skoda SUV might sell as many as 1500 units, but the Kodiaq finished the year having sold just 630.

Our final entry, the Suzuki Ignis, is the one car that performed in line with our expectations. Suzuki predicted the small SUV would sell at the rate of 400 units a month, which translated to about 4500 for the year. We admitted to being less optimistic and halved that number. Our figure of between 2500 and 3000 units was a reasonable approximation for the actual sales – 2406 for the year.

Our last example aside, it's clear that 2017 was a tough year for predictions. That said in hindsight, the signs were there much earlier. President Donald Trump, BREXIT... it should have been obvious from as far back as 2016.