“I don’t gossip, it’s all the blabbermouths I talk to that gossip”. That old saying seems to apply to the fleet market – it is always the other companies that do the distress marketing.

Quite who did the most intensive marketing in the last week of the month is opaque but, collectively, the industry certainly gave registrations a pretty hard push.

At a manufacturer level, Ford is retaining its market leadership despite its much-trumpeted avoidance of what it terms “heavy competitive discounting”.

Second placed Vauxhall has closed much of the gap compared to 2009 which is the good news. The bad news is that Vauxhall took such a hammering in 2009 that an improvement of 10.5% in 2010 is no more than one would have expected – and is actually a smaller improvement than many competitors.

The biggest winner has been Germany PLC (or Germany AG to be accurate). The four main German brands – Audi, BMW, Mercedes and VW – all increased share and now collectively make up 25.7% of the total fleet market.

It is ironic that all those brands built themselves up in the 1980s and 1990s as the discerning person’s alternative to fleet-fodder Ford, Vauxhalls and Rovers. Now they have a higher proportion of the fleet market than they do of the overall market (25.7% of fleet vs. 22.1% of the overall market).

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