"It's the east that's really driving Europe," said industry
Car sales there increased 14 percent year-on-year in the first three months of 2017 alone, to almost 700,000 vehicles, market research firm Jato found.
Poland saw sales grow by 15.5 percent to 277,000 vehicles in the same period, making it Europe's seventh-largest car market.
Over the whole year 2017, sales are expected to reach a new record of 1.3 million in a region stretching from northerly Estonia to Bulgaria on the Black Sea—up 10 percent year-on-year.
That's a slight slowdown from the 16 percent recorded in 2016, industry expert Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer of the Duisburg CAR institute noted, but a great deal more dynamic than the 3.0 percent expected in western Europe.
"Economic growth in the region and the relative lack of market saturation in motor vehicles are the factors underpinning" growth in the east, he said.
Especially in Romania and Bulgaria, which have been members of the European Union for just 10 years, "there remains lots for room" to catch up, Petizon agreed.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-09-carmakers-bonanza-eastern-europe.html#jCp
