Aftermarket February 2023

BY Andrew Marsh, Engineering Director, Auto Industry Consulting Ltd M ature vehicle markets like the UK have taken decades to establish, and are served by a combination of dealers and distributors for new vehicles, a whole gaggle of used vehicle retailers and some of private sales too. The whole process, and all the services around the business from tyres to major mechanical overhaul are built on the following premise: The owner/user has enough disposable income to not only purchase the vehicle, tax it and insure it, but also run it too. This produces a stream of maintenance and repairs, to the extent we can predict the types of job by the season The vehicle uses a lot of common technology, even if the parts are unique and some of the service operations are also manufacturer- specific The owner/user was excited enough about their vehicle to prevent it from falling into disrepair. This ensured as a vehicle wore out or became uneconomic to repair, it would be recycled and a replacement vehicle sought. New vehicle sales steadily expanded until by the 2000s, where they settled at about 2 million cars per year - and the parc grew slowly, meaning roughly each new vehicle matched an old one being recycled. This vast organisation ran smoothly, even as government raided it again 26 AFTERMARKET FEBRUARY 2023 TECHNICAL www.aftermarketonline.net PART ONE: A TALE OF THE UK MARKET No one quite knows how the UK vehicle parc will look by 2030, so in this first of three articles, we consider a market much as it existed up to 2019 and again for tax, or meddled with other random factors. Affordability, accessibility and interest remained strong. Enter Euro 1 to Euro 7 There are emission laws for newly built vehicles, and slightly more relaxed rules for vehicles after the initial sale. From the late 1990s Europe, as a major emission rule maker, sought to improve road transport tail pipe emissions and so introduced technologies which had already been in use both in the USA as well as Japan. The difference was the plan; Each stage would last for a few years before the new vehicle tail pipe emission limits became smaller. The tipping point was a push by several governments including the UK towards diesel engines for cars, in