Sales in the EU of passenger vehicles dropped 8.4% in December compared to a year earlier. It was the fourth month in a row of sharp year-over-year declines that wiped out the growth of the first eight months of 2018: Sep: -23.5% Oct: -7.3% Nov: -8.0% Dec: -8.4% The ACEA (French acronym for European Automobile Manufacturers Association), which reports the EU registration data, blamed this debacle on the “introduction of WLTP in September.” This is the new emissions and fuel-economy testing procedure for automakers in the EU. There was a tsunami of discounting by automakers over the summer to get the maximum number of ... (full story)