Sales of large SUVs in Europe have been in a downward trend in recent years and that trend continues in the first half of 2019 with a decline of 23% in deliveries as this remains the smallest segment of the European car market with fewer than 19.000 sales in the first six months of the year. Interestingly, this same segment is one of the largest in the United States representing over 12% of the total market with just over one million sales in the first half, compared to just 0,2% of the European market. After every single nameplate in this class lost volume in Q1 of 2019, there’s one model that showed an improvement in Q2, while all the others were down by double digits. The top-3 has been turned upside down in Q2 but not enough to change the ranking for the first half. In the second quarter the new generation Hyundai Santa Fe was outsold by its sibling model Kia Sorento while the Ford Edge took the lead. As a result, the Edge is just one sale behind the Sorento in third place, with the Santa Fe ahead by just another 22 sales. A close race indeed! Hyundai-Kia now holds just under half of this segment and Ford another quarter.
Still, Ford has announced it will stop selling the Edge in a number of European countries because some countries place higher tax burdens on high emission vehicles which would make the Edge too expensive in those markets to be viable anyway. Ford will focus its marketing and sales efforts on just seven markets which represented 82% of the European sales volume of the model. Those countries are Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Poland, Austria, Belgium and Romania, but surprisingly not the UK where Ford usually sells a significant share of its European volume.
The remaining quarter of the segment besides the top-3 is dominated by the Toyota Land Cruiser, now that the Mitsubishi Pajero (known as Montero in Spain and Shogun in the UK) has been killed by WLTP fuel efficiency standards, while the SsangYong Rexton can’t seem to get traction despite being one of the freshest models in the segment, besides the Santa Fe.
Also check out the mid-sized SUV segment in the USA, where even the #17 best selling model sells more units than the entire segment in Europe.
| Large SUV segment | 2019-H1 | 2018-H1 | Change | |
| 1 | Hyundai Santa Fe | 4.713 | 4.702 | 0% |
| 2 | Kia Sorento | 4.691 | 5.815 | -19% |
| 3 | Ford Edge | 4.690 | 6.577 | -29% |
| 4 | Toyota Land Cruiser | 3.350 | 3.718 | -10% |
| 5 | SsangYong Rexton | 1.059 | 1.419 | -25% |
| 6 | Mitsubishi Pajero / Montero / Shogun | 373 | 2.188 | -83% |
| Segment total | 18.876 | 24.429 | -23% |
Click on any model to see its annual sales from 1997-2018 and monthly sales from 2015 to 2018, or use the dropdown menu in the top right of this site.
Car sales statistics are from the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.
Sources: Manufacturers, ANDC, JATO Dynamics.