New vehicle registrations went almost nowhere in July. The Motor Industry Association counted 11,663 for the month, 25 more than July last year, a rise of 0.2 per cent. That is the sort of number you read once and move past.
Almost nothing underneath it stayed still.
Passenger vehicles and SUVs were up 14.7 per cent on July 2025, at 8,736 registrations. Light commercials went the other way and fell 28.2 per cent, from 3,507 to 2,518. Heavy commercials were down 20.9 per cent.
A dealership built around SUVs and one built around utes could compare notes on July and reasonably wonder whether they were trading in the same country.
Keep the light commercial number in proportion, though. Year to date, light commercial registrations are down 52 units, or 0.3 per cent, on a base of nearly twenty thousand. July was one soft month inside a flat year rather than the start of a slide. Ute demand follows business confidence and interest rates, and it tends to arrive and vanish in lumps.
Battery electric and plug in hybrid vehicles made up 29.8 per cent of all new registrations in July. In July last year those same two technologies were 11.8 per cent.
Passenger vehicles on their own are starker. Battery electric took 22.3 per cent of passenger registrations and plug in hybrids another 14.4 per cent, so 36.7 per cent of the new passenger vehicles registered in July arrived with a plug. Count non plug in hybrids as well and electrified vehicles were 56.6 per cent of the whole market.
Year to date, the plug in share of passenger registrations is 28.5 per cent against 12.8 per cent for the same seven months of 2025. It has more than doubled in a year. MIA chief executive Aimee Wiley credited wider model choice, more competitive pricing and buyers paying closer attention to running costs.
BYD was the third largest brand in the country in July on 829 registrations, ahead of Mitsubishi on 801 and Kia on 755. Toyota and Ford still hold the top two places, comfortably.
Tesla's Model Y is the second best selling passenger model year to date on 2,311, behind only the RAV4. Zeekr's 7X was the second best selling battery electric vehicle in July on 151 units, and Zeekr did not make the top fifteen passenger brands for the whole of 2025. Nor did Chery, which took tenth place among passenger brands in July, or Jaecoo, which sits fifteenth year to date.
Whatever your view on how durable any of that turns out to be, a salesperson is now expected to hold a credible conversation about brands that were not on the board eighteen months ago, against a customer who has been researching them all week.
The RAV4 is still the top selling passenger model year to date on 3,918, and it is down 24.4 per cent on the same period in 2025.
The interesting part is where the volume that remains has gone. The RAV4 plug in hybrid was the best selling PHEV in the country in July on 515 units, which is 41 per cent of every plug in hybrid registered that month. A third of RAV4 volume this year is now the plug in variant, which did not appear in these tables at all a year ago. The model is smaller than it was, and the shape of it has changed underneath the badge.
A plug in enquiry is not the same conversation as a petrol one. It brings questions about charging at home, about battery warranty and degradation, about what the running cost really looks like next to the vehicle being traded, and often about a brand the customer had not heard of two years ago. Very few of those get settled in a single visit.
More questions means more contacts per sale. If a third of your passenger enquiries now come from plug in shoppers, your follow up is carrying more weight than it was twelve months ago, and the distance between a lead somebody works properly and a lead that quietly goes cold has widened.
Test drives matter more as well, for an unglamorous reason: nobody who has never driven an electric vehicle can form a view about it from a brochure.
Registrations are not retail sales. Business buyers took 53.1 per cent of July registrations, government 2.3 per cent and rental 4.1 per cent, which leaves private buyers on 40.4 per cent. Plenty of those business registrations still involve a salesperson and a showroom, but the monthly total is not a count of retail deals and it should not be read as one.
And one month is one month. The year to date total is 83,020 registrations, 10.6 per cent ahead of the same period in 2025. Both things hold at once: the year is well up, and July was flat with a very uneven mix underneath it.
The August figures land in early September. The number worth watching is not the headline total. It is whether plug in passenger share holds above a third.
Figures in this article come from the Motor Industry Association's July 2026 new vehicle registration data, published 4 August 2026.