Iceland Top 50 Sales By Model : 2021

With registrations up a healthy 37%, increases were always going to be plentiful. I colour coded the list to show where brands historically originated. Asian models are strong, especially at the top of the list. Europe is not as popular with best selling models with the USA (via Tesla) having more success.

Point of interest: The Suzuki Swace is a Toyota Corolla Sports Tourer (wagon) hybrid that is nearly identical to the donor car. It outsold the Corolla in Iceland, something it may not do anywhere else. It broadens Suzuki's range and gets company emissions even lower. I can't see why this shouldn't happen more often.   

Data source: Samgongustofa. 

Iceland Sales : 2021

Sales were +54% in December and for the year in total +34%. The year started poorly and then took off. The total of 12,734 is well up on the 9,300 registrations a year previous but far short of the 17,850 of 2018. Stock availability is being affected by the semiconductor chip shortage. 

The data below compares market share variance, not sales increase or decrease. So a brand would have to better a 37% rise in sales to get into positive territory in the '+/- Diff' column. Green shading shows which brands achieved that.

Kia has passed longstanding leader Toyota with a huge increase in registrations with the Niro model the best selling for the brand. There seems to be little problem getting chips in Korea. Electric cars are popular in Iceland due to incentives. Tesla is a popular marque thanks to the take up of electric cars. MG arrived last year and is starting to make its presence felt for the same reason.

Data source: Samgongustofa.

China Top 50 Sales By Model : 2021

One thing that is immediately obvious is the size of the market. It also has a broad variety of brands, many familiar to those looking in and others not so. To see if any pattern can be observed, I colour coded the list to show where brands historically originated. I wondered about Roewe, a brand taken from Rover in the UK but the name is owned by BMW. So while it technically originated in the UK, the necessary changing of the name makes it Chinese. 

China: The colour chosen is salmon and there is a broad spread across the list but not dominating at all. Pictured above is the Wuling Hongguang Mini EV and mini it certainly is. At the bottom of the article, we see the Roewe i5.

Asia: Representing Japan and Korea, the yellow shading is more noticeable near the top so brands from these countries have some big hitting models.

Europe: Pale blue and not much at the top of the list, VW models generally going down in volume adding to this. 

USA: Buick is a popular brand here and purple highlights that. The recent arrival of Tesla has given some support to US presence.