Ireland’s car market is tiny. While it’s true that the motor trade here employs a significant number of people (30,000-plus), in new car sales terms it’s a tiny gnat perched on the buttocks of a hippo. Our average 120,000-or-so new cars sold every year is the equivalent of one minor UK city, or a large US dealership.
The big brands – Toyota, Hyundai, VW – will sell something in the region of 15,000 cars each year here. To be more precise, last year Toyota sold 17,251 new cars; Volkswagen 13,520; and Hyundai 11,049 (those last two split by Skoda, which sold 12,182).
These are significant chunks of the market, but at the other end there are marques that manage a tiny fraction of that, car brands whose sales are in double figures, and not necessarily large double figures.
There are a handful that have single figure sales, but those include the specialist likes of Ferrari (five), Lotus (three), and Aston Martin (one). There is one other in single-digit territory – Alpine – but we’ll deal with that separately in a minute.
However, there are also brands, far better known, whose sales failed to pierce the century barrier last year. One of those was Alfa Romeo. When Ireland’s car market was at its numerical peak 25 years ago, Alfa Romeo managed to hold a 1 per cent market share purely based on the sales of its hugely successful 156 saloon.
Now, though? Only 43 new Alfa Romeos were sold in Ireland last year. Little-heralded DS sold three times as many cars. BMW, once a company that envied Alfa Romeo’s success in the 1950s and 1960s, sold four times as many.
So what does that mean for the future of Alfa Romeo? A brand that is aimed at well-heeled but nonetheless mainstream car buyers cannot survive for long on such tiny sales.
Until the departure of chief executive Carlos Tavares from Stellantis Group – the car-making conglomerate that owns Alfa Romeo alongside Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, Opel, Jeep and many more – Alfa’s future had been secure for at least a decade, as the brand was given at long last the sort of investment that it has too often lacked. In the past few days, that future may have become somewhat less secure, as Tavares’s departure means Stellantis is more hawkish about its overstuffed cabinet of brands.
Nonetheless, Ciaran Cusack, communications and brands manager at Gowan Auto, the Alfa Romeo importer for Ireland, told The Irish Times: “We only have three dealers in the Alfa Romeo network, although we are planning to expand that number in the future and grow the brand sustainably in Ireland. In fact, one of our dealers opened a new state-of-the-art showroom late last year, which is one of the first of its kind in Europe.”
Cusack said Alfa’s Irish dealers understand the brand’s position, that it is a niche premium brand undergoing a transformation and that the recent line-up is not where the volume will come from. Jam tomorrow? Maybe, but there seems to be hope waiting in the wings (albeit Alfa Romeo has gone through multiple generations of rebirth and retraction).
“This year’s launch of the new Junior model has changed things, allowing Irish customers to experience the brand from just under €35,000,” said Cusack.
“This is the first fully electric model for the brand and the first on a Stellantis platform, so you can get a good indication of the future of the brand from this model.
“Currently only available in full electric, the arrival of the hybrid version later this year will give us a great chance to increase volume and gain market share.
“We brought our dealer network to Turin late last year to give them an exclusive look at the models coming over the next two years and to show them the future of the brand with Stellantis. They were suitably impressed.”
Those new models include a new Stelvio SUV, which is scheduled for release in late 2025 and which will be built on Stellantis’s STLA Large platform – that allows both fully-electric power with ranges exceeding 700km, and hybrid petrol power too. In 2026 we will see the all-new Giulia which will also use the STLA large platform. It means Alfa will have an entirely regenerated range, including crucial electric and hybrid models that it has until now lacked, within two years.
Alfa is a brand beloved of motoring enthusiasts (this writer included) and, while the marque has had more than its share of flops, to lose it altogether would be to make the motoring world a poorer, less interesting place.
What, then, of Subaru and GWM Ora? Both brands are represented here by International Motors (IM), a UK-based car importer and distributor, which has a long history of success.
Yet, last year Subaru sold just 24 new cars in Ireland, while GWM Ora (part of China’s huge Great Wall Motors) sold just 46 cars, all of them the cutesy-styled 03 electric hatchback (née Funky Cat, until the point where the marketing people at GWM realised that no English-speaking buyer wants a car called Funky Cat).
Subaru’s faltering sales can be partly explained by the car maker being so focused on the US market that it often produces models that, even with hybrid power, are just too thirsty and too high in CO2 emissions for Irish tastes and budgets.
Ora is a single-car brand, but you’d think that the engineering and financial muscle of Great Wall Motors might have done rather better even so. After all, Polestar shifted 314 cars last year, and almost all of those were the Polestar 2 saloon.
The solution for both brands seems to be to consolidate operations with the much larger IM structure in the UK.
That, and the promise of new models yet to come that will hopefully be better suited to the mores of the Irish market.
William Brown, managing director of International Motors Limited UK & Ireland, told The Irish Times: “In August 2024, International Motors Ltd concluded a review of its operational division for Ireland and restructured its business accordingly. This included amalgamating Ireland and UK sales and marketing operations to streamline and future-proof the business and improve efficiency for both the Subaru and GWM brands. This results in Ireland being managed by a much larger team, with more resources.
“Subaru has announced that it will unveil three new EV products before the close of 2026, with more to follow by the end of 2028, as it grows its product portfolio. GWM has recently released the Haval Jolion Pro Hybrid in the UK, which is currently under consideration for Ireland. We continue to be committed to supporting our dealers and customers in Ireland for both Subaru and GWM.”
Arguably, the brand with low 2024 sales that has the most potential is Alpine. Renault’s high-performance and electric brand – yes, the one that has its own Formula One and Le Mans racing teams – was supposed to have had a low-key launch in Ireland last year with the A110 sports car.
That mid-engined delight, which is a rival to the likes of the Porsche Cayman, is poorly suited to Ireland as it (a) is a sports car, (b) is expensive and (c) has relatively high emissions.
Unsurprisingly, the launch was called off. Even so, enough Irish buyers had worked out the truth, which is that the A110 is quite frankly one of the best cars you will ever drive, and so a tiny number were sold here last year.
However, Alpine will finally launch properly this year, and it will do so with electric power – the little A290 electric hot hatch is based on Renault’s gorgeous new all-electric R5 E-Tech, and promises proper driving fun with tiny electric running costs.
Next up is the A390, which will be a sleek four-seat crossover, again with electric power, while the A110 itself will be replaced in 2026 by a new two-seat electric sports car. Renault’s marketing nous plus electric power might well mean that Alpine has the best chance of any on this page of climbing past the 100 sales barrier. We’ll start to find out when the marque launches properly here in May.
The thing is, none of the aforementioned brands are actually small brands. Alpine is part of the now-hugely-successful-once-again Renault Group (following its nadir of 2020); Subaru is a massive brand in the US and in other parts of the world; Alfa Romeo is part of Stellantis and has said that its new model programme is fully costed and invested for an entire decade; GWM Ora is part of an enormous Chinese conglomerate.
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It’s that last one that ought to worry the others most, however. According to S&P Markets analysis, smaller brands, especially those from China, are “gaining traction” with consumers, and that traction can only come at the expense of European, Japanese, and American brands with which local buyers have fallen out of love. Alfa Romeo, Subaru and Alpine had better get their collective acts together, and fast, as harder days are most definitely ahead.
