Chinese brand MG has reason to pop the champagne today after it made it to the top 10 of new car sales in New Zealand, thanks in part to its electric SUV.

While overall, new vehicle registrations were down 14.2 per cent in November compared to the same month last year, but that figure is better than expected earlier this year.

Motor Industry Association (MIA) Chief Executive David Crawford says that November 2020 registrations of new vehicles remain lower than this time last year but are slightly stronger than recent months. 

November registrations were 11,889 vehicles registered, down 1961 units on the same month last year. 

“Year to date the market is down 22.5 per cent, which is a better result than anticipated back April when we were in the depths of the Covid-19 lockdown period,” said Crawford.

There were 142 pure electric vehicles, 92 PHEV’s and 1089 hybrid vehicles sold for the month with MG ZS EV entering  the market with 60 units registered for the month. 

MG NZ launched its electric vehicle earlier this month, with a new price of NZ$48,990, slashing the original price by $7000.

Overall, MG registered 252 vehicles with MG NZ’s manager, Anthony MacLean, saying in a Linkedin post yesterday that “we have achieved this despite being only our second November of trading in NZ, and we haven't yet completed a full calendar year”.

MG NZ was in the top 12 overall for vehicles and top 10 for new cars/SUVs, beating big players Volkswagen (in 11th spot with 212) and 12th placed  Mercedes-Benz  (194).

Registration of 8036 passenger and SUVs for November 2020 were down 16.6 per cent (1604 units) on 2019 volumes, while commercial vehicle registrations of 3853 were down 8.5 per cent (357 units) compared to November 2019.

The top three models for the month of November were the Ford Ranger (1006 units), followed by the new model Toyota Hilux (636 units) with the Toyota RAV4 in third place (511 units).

Toyota remains the overall market leader with 19 per cent market share (2311 units), followed by Ford with 13 per cent  (1524 units) and Mitsubishi in third spot also with 11 per cent market share (1263 units).