Car dealers offer discounts to attract buyers in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. [Photo/China Daily]

BEIJING - China's auto sales rose 3.9 percent year on year to 61.53 million units in the first quarter, data from an industry association showed on Thursday.

The growth marked a significant deceleration from the 9.2 percent rise in the first quarter of 2014 and the 6.9 percent increase for the whole of 2014, according to the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers.

Meanwhile, the country's vehicle output stood at 62.02 million units, a year-on-year increase of 5.26 percent, also notably lower than the 9.2 percent growth for the same period last year and the 7.3 percent rise for 2014, the data showed.

In the first quarter 2015, sales of commercial vehicles tumbled 19.48 percent year on year from a year earlier, while output fell 18.44 percent year on year.

Sales of Chinese-brand passenger cars accounted for 43.21 percent of China's passenger car market, up 4.23 percentage points from the same period last year.

In addition, China's new energy vehicle production in the first quarter of 2015 jumped threefold year on year to 25,400 vehicles, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said on Thursday.

The output of pure electric passenger cars rose 400 percent from a year earlier to 11,000 cars, with plug-in hybrid passenger cars rising nearly 500 percent to 7,257 in the first three months of this year.

The output of pure electric and plug-in hybrid commercial vehicles went up by 500 percent and 61 percent, respectively.