ACEA Data - New registrations by Manufacturer - Intro

Being a well-established industry in which several associations are present, it is fairly easy to find free and publicly available data on the automotive world, at least for the new vehicle registrations. For example, ACEA (Association des Constructeurs Européens d'Automobiles in French, European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association in English) has a specific section dedicated to different statistics, providing reports, forecasts and data.

It is actually this part that I find at the same time interesting and with the possibility to extract relevant information out of it. The way in which data is provided is in my opinion not optimal, for several reasons (I will take as example the New Registration data by Manufacturer, as for example here):

• There is a different file each year (at least, as in some cases, two files are present, one for Western Europe one for Enlarged Europe, see below*), not allowing for an easy historical view.

• The data is provided in a table in which the month and brand/group (or country in the By Country datasets) are represented in the columns and lines, respectively. Giving the fact that there are tens of brands, the amount of data present is very high, and it is not easy to focus on the more relevant numbers.

• Subtotal are present: they do help in clustering data at a higher level then just brands, but at the same time they do complicate the process of extracting and re-workiong the data, as they are actually a repetition (aggregation) of data already present.

• Extra point, not really critical: The naming of the files is not consistent, there was a naming change over time and in several cases the filename is somehow different.

Given all these point, I decided to rework the data files, in order to have all the data in a single file and in a format that allows quicker and more effective analyses, with the possibility to create custom reports with just a few clicks. The format I think it is most useful  has in each column a specific dimensions (time, group/brand) and each line represent a single data point (see screenshot below). In this way, it is very easy to use the powerful pivoting functions present in Excel and other softwares.

At the moment I'm still in the process to tranform the data (possible topic for a near-future post, an explanation on how I'm performing the format convertion), so I have data from 2006 up to 2013 (most recent data available) and I'm focusing only on the passenger cars (PC) segment for the moment.

The figure below is graph obtained from the data I already processed. As it can be seen, the market is schrinking from its high levels in 2006 and 2013. Overall, in the 7 years before 2013, there was an decline in the number of registration in Europe: a CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate, see more explanations on Investopedia) of -3,52% can thus be computed.

More analysis and the full dataset will come soon and there will be new posts soon on this topic. If you are interested, the actual file (as mentioned, not complete) can be downloaded from clicking here.

* Western Europe: EU15 (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the UK) + EFTA (Iceland, Norway, Switzerland)

Enlarged Europe: Western Europe + EU11 (Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia)