Automotive industry

Automotive production in many Turkish factories has not been suspended so far despite the measures taken by the authorities to fend off coronavirus pandemic risks, representative of automakers said on March 18.

Turkey's car and light commercial vehicle sales jumped 89.5 percent year-on-year in February, an industry group reported on March 3.

The Automotive Distributors' Association (ODD) announced that more than 47,000 automobiles were sold last month.

Passenger car sales surged 96 percent in the same period to some 37,750.

The number of motor vehicle registrations in Turkey jumped 42.2 percent year-on-year to 94,540 vehicles in January, the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK) announced on Feb. 28.

"At the end of January, the total number of road motor vehicles registered reached 23.2 million," TÜİK said.

German car giant Volkswagen will delay the decision to build a new plant in Turkey for the second time, MIA reports.

The agency cites an anonymous source in the British media, according to which the

"We still have time and can certainly do that decision by mid-year," said the source, who is familiar with VW's discussions.

Volkswagen is again postponing its decision on whether to build a car plant in Turkey, a source told Reuters on Tuesday, after the company halted the process in the wake of international criticism of the country's military operations in Syria.

"We still have time and can certainly do that [decision] by mid-year," the person familiar with the discussions said.

Volkswagen announced on Monday that it has once again postponed the opening date of some of its production facilities in China because of the coronavirus concerns.

The German carmaker said that Saic Volkswagen - the joint venture between Volkswagen and Saic Motor Corp- will resume its activities as early as February 24th.

Volkswagen was the most popular car brand in Turkey in January in terms of the number of units it sold on the local market, the latest data have shown.
In the month, the German carmaker managed to sell a total of 3,700 vehicles, according to the calculations of Anadolu Agency, based on the figures from the Automotive Distributors' Association (ODD).

Japan's automotive giant Toyota said today it would extend the suspension of its Chinese factories by one week until February 16 because of the country's coronavirus epidemic crisis.

Japanese automotive giant Toyota announced Wednesday that its factories in China will remain closed until February 9th due to the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Overall in 2019, new-car registrations increased by 1.2% across the European Union, reaching more than 15.3 million units in total and marking the sixth consecutive year of growth. The year started on weak footing due to the lasting impact of the introduction of the WLTP test in September 2018.