New Delhi-headquartered online marketplace Droom recently released its annual automobile industry trend report, which reported a 300 percent increase in digital adoption by consumers.

The report highlighted that the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated this digital adoption and the shift was more pronounced among used cars and 2-wheelers as opposed to new ones.

The company’s annual automobile industry trend report for India based on all the buyer and seller activity online and its proprietary methodology. The report is based on large sample of over 1.1 billion visitors, 20,000+ auto dealers, 1,086 cities, 3 million listings, $25 billion (Rs 185,025 crore) in listed inventory on Droom platform with over 315,000 vehicles sold and $3.1 billion (Rs 22,943 crore) in sold GMV.

Some of the key trends from the report are as follows –

• Adoption for the automobile online has accelerated during Covid-19 with Droom’s organic and direct traffic leads and no. of listings have grown more than 300% post-Covid, a proxy to heightened online activities among consumers.
• India’s obsession for White and Silver holds true and these 2 colours account for over 50% of the total pre-owned cars sold.
• India’s shift to Diesel cars continues with diesel cars going up from 35% of the total preowned cars sold in 2015 to 65% by 2020.
• The average duration of ownership for the car is at 6 years, bikes and scooters around 5 years and the superbike are around 3 years. Directionally, the average duration for the ownership of the car is reducing (66 months in 2019 to 60 months in 2020).
• Indian and Japanese cars OEMs account for 55% of total pre-owned cars sold and this number has stayed range-bound. However, German cars have made more in-roads and have gone up from 10% of total pre-owned cars sold to 18% and Korean cars have gone down from 20% to 12%. 
• The adoption of auto transmission further increased in 2020 and has gone up from 20% to 35% in the last 6 years.
• In 2-Wheelers, Indian OEMs continue to dominate with 54% market share and 42% by Japanese OEM and the rest of the world account for only 4% of total pre-owned 2-wheelers.
• Maruti Suzuki Swift Dzire remains the bestselling pre-owned car and Hero Splendor Plus best-selling 2-wheeler.

Speaking on the findings Sandeep Aggarwal, founder and CEO, Droom said, “At Droom we have been building a 21st century digital platform and ecosystem for buying and selling automobiles. Given we are a pure-play online company and have petabytes of data on buyers, sellers, listings, brands, years, and cities for the automobile. It is always a great pleasure to share top insights from this data with the automobile industry fraternity.”