Who buys passenger vehicles and SUVs in Chile?

According to the latest report from the National Automobile Association of Chile, sales of new vehicles during the first nine months of the year suffered a significant decline that reached 29% compared to the same period of 2022. In total, 236 079 new vehicles were sold. marketed light and medium and this aggravates the crisis that the sector is going through.

By distribution segment, SUVs continue to dominate sales with 107,342 units sold so far this year; followed by trucks, which recorded a total of 53,587 registered units; In third position are Passenger Vehicles, with 49,649 units and, finally, the Light Commercial Vehicles segment, which recorded 25,501 units between January and September. All this, with a considerable drop in sales as the graph indicates.

For the first time, the union body’s report provides results by type of buyer and by segment. Although depending on the vehicle type it is clearer to understand what is happening in the truck and utility vehicle segments, what is happening in the passenger vehicle and SUV segments is quite interesting.

In the truck sector (which represents 22.7% of the total market of new vehicles sold), 82.9% of acquisitions come from companies, while in the utility vehicle sector (10.8% of the total), this type buyer reach 79.9%, of which 20.1% are natural. people who buy this type of vehicle.

In the case of the Passenger Vehicles category and according to data provided by Anac, 80.1% of sales this year were made to individuals and 19.9% ​​correspond to purchases made by companies or individuals. morals.

In the SUV segment, 87% of buyers are individuals and only 13% of registrations were carried out by Companies or Legal Entities.

For Manuel Breton, fleet manager at Toyota Chile, this percentage of non-natural persons found in the passenger vehicle and SUV segments is due “mainly to car rental or leasing companies, an economic model that is quite stable in recent years and which in general it remains at this percentage of sales. What has been growing bit by bit in recent years is the business of rental inquiry companies, although the numbers are still insignificant, but it is something that will grow as the business matures .

Juan Pablo Ulloa, Gildemeister fleet manager, thinks the same thing. “These figures of almost 20% for cars and 13% for SUVs mainly correspond to car rental activities and must be between 85 and 90% of these figures. The other lower percentage – but which still does not move the sales needle – is due to company cars and, of course, the new rental applications that exist in Chile and which have been growing in recent times and will continue to increase. Today we see more and more people choosing to rent a car for days, weeks or months, without having to buy it,” explains Ulloa.

For the Toyota manager, “the other thing that can influence this 20% is the multinationals, which buy what we call company cars, which is more and more frequent and which are turning to models which belong to the SUV category. What we are sure of is that in the coming years low and zero emission cars will increase in this type of purchases, where companies with greater social responsibility will want to have this type of vehicles in their ranks.

Ulloa adds in this article that “at Hyundai we have a significant demand for this type of vehicle, but what we have seen is that the market is still reluctant to invest in this type of car, mainly due to future value, and this penalizes a lot of business and, ultimately, favors thermal cars. Without incentives, companies considering the purchase of this type of car as a business, which remains expensive, are not very viable, unless they have a much more ecological vision.