PARIS (Reuters) -- A 21.2 percent jump in December sales driven by big cars, just ahead of a new CO2 levy on the most polluting cars, helped France to register 3.2 percent more new cars in 2007 than in 2006.

The CCFA French car industry body said in a statement on Wednesday that 2,064,633 new passenger cars were registered in 2007, up 2.8 percent on 2006 on a same working-day basis. This performance was slightly ahead of expectations of a flat year.
In early December, the government announced penalties for car pollution, from 200 to 2,600 euros ($3,813) per vehicle, that would be applied towards the end of the year.
Cleaner cars can get a bonus of 200 euros to 5,000 euros for electric cars. A spokesman for Peugeot said the market seemed to have anticipated the implementation of these measures.
“In the end 2007 was a rather decent year for the French car market, only several thousand cars short of 2005,” CCFA said.
“After an uncertain first half, the situation changed in July and the gains became bigger towards the end of the year,” it added.
The French market has been holding up just above 2 million cars since 2003, with declines in 2006 and 2005, following boom years in 1999-2002 when sales were above 2.2 million vehicles.
This is in line with the general trend in Western Europe and analysts expect the market to remain flat in 2008, or slip should the debt market crisis trigger a consumer recession.
“The European auto demand outlook for 2008 is mixed and uncertain, but we expect volumes to fall as economic growth in the major economies slows,” said Stephen Cheetham at Bernstein.
“The economic outlook for 2008 is for lower growth: on this basis we believe that car sales will fall around 1 percent. This is a relatively benign outlook -- we would expect a fall of 10 percent or more in a full-blown consumer recession as occurred in the 1970's and 1990's,” he added, saying car companies' share valuations were relatively high.
------------------- BMW & Mercedes roar ahead
The French carmakers saw their market share drop to below 50 percent in December 2007, at 45.5 percent versus 51.8 percent.
Big rises were posted by makers of cars such as BMW, up 53 percent in December for all its brands, and Daimler rose 64.9 percent in December with a 69.9 percent gain for Mercedes alone. But Hyundai also added 62.2 percent and Ford 40.3 percent in December -- that includes Jaguar sales.
For the year as a whole, the French firms held on to 51.8 percent of the market which was down from 54.3 percent in 2006. PSA Peugeot Citroen, Europe's second-biggest auto group after Volkswagen, gained 2 percent to 626,798.
This reflected a 7.5 percent rise for Citroen and a 2.1 percent decline at Peugeot. PSA chief executive Christian Streiff recently replaced the managing director for Peugeot and new head Jean-Philippe Colin will detail the world sales of the brand on Jan 8, after a conference by Citroen's Gilles Michel.
Renault, in the first year of a new product offensive aimed at boosting sales and profit margins, posted a 3 percent decline to 476,171 vehicles in 2007. This included a 6.1 percent drop for the Renault brand and a 74.1 percent jump for Romanian unit Dacia which makes the Logan.
Renault's main new vehicle launch, the Laguna saloon, was in the last quarter of 2007 and several other new models such as the Koleos 4X4 car will be added in 2008.
Renault will detail global sales on Jan. 4.
Renault shares rose 1.2 percent to 98.21 euros by 1332 GMT and PSA was up 1.8 percent at 52.77 euros.
Volkswagen was third in the French market in 2007, with 4.7 percent higher group sales at 247,381 cars.
The French car market ranked fourth in 2006 after Germany, Italy and Britain and ahead of Spain.
The 2007 ranking is due on Jan. 16.