UK March car sales: winners & losers

March is the month that makes the UK car market look bigger, louder, and more revealing than usual. It is the main plate-change month, when buyers rush to get the new registration, and in 2026 it delivered 380,627 new-car registrations, up 6.6% from a year earlier. That made it the strongest March, and the strongest month of any kind, since 2019. Private demand did more of the work this time, rising 10.1%, while fleet sales grew 3.5% and business registrations climbed 18.8% (smmt.co.uk). That broad rise matters because it keeps this story from being just a quirk of one hot brand. The market grew, but it did not grow evenly. Motor Trader’s brand breakdown shows the clearest split: the biggest gainers were overwhelmingly Chinese marques still in expansion mode, while several established European names went backwards hard. Leapmotor’s registrations jumped 878% to 1,891 cars in March. Xpeng rose 819% to 331. Jaecoo surged 574% to 12,034. Omoda was up 184% to 5,917. BYD climbed 134% to 15,162. On the losing side, DS fell 71% to 22 cars, Abarth dropped 52% to 43, Fiat slid 43% to 1,167, Subaru fell 39.9% to 377, and Lotus dropped 37% to 1,657 (motortrader.com). The obvious question is whether these giant percentage gains are mostly statistical tricks. For some brands, yes. It is easy to post an 800% increase when you were barely present a year ago. But that excuse stops working when the volumes get big, and some of them now are. BYD did not just grow quickly. It added more than 15,000 registrations in a single month. Jaecoo did not just appear in the rankings. It broke into the center of the market. Autocar reports that the Jaecoo 7 was the UK’s best-selling car in March, with 10,064 registrations, ahead of the Ford Puma on 9,193, the Nissan Qashqai on 8,718, and the Kia Sportage on 7,310 (autocar.co.uk). That is the real story here. The winners were not simply EV specialists riding a temporary electric-car spike. They were brands selling exactly what the British market already buys in huge numbers: compact and mid-size crossovers, often with hybrid or plug-in hybrid options, wrapped in aggressive pricing and lots of standard kit. Motor Trader noted before the March figures landed that Chinese brands had already taken nearly 10% of the UK market in 2025, and that Jaecoo alone sold 28,232 cars last year despite arriving only in January 2025. Of the Jaecoo 7’s 2025 sales, about 70% were plug-in hybrids, which helps explain why it can surf both the SUV boom and the push toward lower-emission drivetrains (motortrader.com). That push toward electrified drivetrains was real in March, but it still did not hit the government’s target. Battery-electric registrations rose 24.2% to a record 86,120, plug-in hybrids jumped 46.9% to 49,671, and hybrids grew 7.3% to 60,268. Petrol still led on sheer volume at 165,997 cars, even after a 6.1% decline, while diesel fell 11.4% to 18,571. BEVs took 22.6% of the market in March, well short of the 33% share required by the UK’s 2026 ZEV mandate. So the market’s winners were not merely the pure-EV brands. They were the companies that met buyers where they actually are, not where policy says they should already be (smmt.co.uk). That leaves the losers looking less mysterious than they first appear. Brands such as DS, Abarth, Fiat, Alfa Romeo, Seat, and Genesis were not just hit by bad luck in one strong month. They were squeezed in the exact parts of the market where new entrants are flooding in with fresher products and sharper prices. March exposed that pressure in the bluntest possible way. The month’s standout model was not a Ford, Nissan, Kia, or Tesla. It was a Jaecoo 7, a Chinese SUV from a brand that did not exist in the UK 15 months earlier, and it finished March with 10,064 registrations (autocar.co.uk).