Electric cars are on the rise. It is not only a reflection of the growing supply on the part of car companies, but also the popularity of plug-in cars among customers. While sales of all cars combined have been falling for several years in a row, sales of pure electric cars are growing rapidly. Last year, 1.56 million of them were sold in Europe, which, for example, is twice the number compared to 2020.
In Europe, 11.31 million new cars were sold last year, 4.1 percent less than in 2021 and, above all, the least since 1985. This follows from data from the analytical company Jato Dynamics. If we compare this figure with the last pre-pandemic year, i.e. 2019, then it is a drop of a really significant 29 percent.
Reasons? “Lack of cars in showrooms, inflation, energy crisis,” Jata analyst Felipe Munoz lists. It also brings to mind the ongoing shortage of chips and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has crippled supply chains and energy prices across Europe.
Europe’s best-selling cars
The Peugeot 208 became the best-selling new car last year with 206,815 units sold. For the first time in fourteen years, the annual sales statistics are not dominated by the Volkswagen Golf. The latter struggled with production shutdowns and with 177,000 vehicles sold fell to fifth place overall. The second Dacia Sandero, the third VW T-Roc and the fourth Fiat 500 finished ahead of it. The top ten also included the Toyota Yaris, Opel Corsa, Hyundai Tucson, Dacia Duster and, despite a 27 percent year-on-year drop, even the Renault Clio.
The best-selling Škoda is the Octavia in 25th place with less than 113,000 units sold. No other model from Mladá Boleslav got over the hundred thousand unit mark, the closest to it was Fabia with less than 86 thousand cars sold, followed by Kamiq and Karoq with 71 and 70 thousand units, respectively.
Despite the significant drop in the entire market, there is at least one category of new cars that is doing better than expected. That’s electric cars. According to Jat, their popularity across 28 European markets grew by 29 percent year-on-year – from 1.21 to a record 1.56 million units.
Looking further into the past, the difference stands out even more strikingly. In 2020, only 0.74 million electric cars were sold, compared to only 0.36 million a year earlier. In four years, their sales have thus doubled, which of course goes hand in hand with how car companies are steeply increasing their offer and moving away from internal combustion engines accordingly.
One more figure that proves the popularity of electric cars: almost 14 out of 100 vehicles sold in Europe last year were purely electric.
Battery electric cars cut 13.9 percent of the total pie, only mild hybrids (15.3 percent) and cars with a gasoline or diesel engine had more. There were 51.4 percent of them, 6.5 percent less year-on-year.
As we also mentioned here, the highest share is achieved by electric cars in Norway, where last year 79.3 percent of new cars had a battery drive. Sweden is second with 33 percent, the Netherlands third with 23.5 percent. Finland, Switzerland and Germany follow – the last-named market leads in terms of the total number of electric cars sold, with almost 471,000 units last year.
On the contrary, the Czechia stands at the opposite end of the ranking, despite the fact that sales of electric cars increased significantly last year. However, their share in total sales reached only 2.03 percent. Italy is also in a bad position with 3.7 percent, Spain with 3.76 percent or Poland with 2.7 percent – to name only the largest European markets for new cars. By the way, Italy was the only country where sales of electric cars decreased year-on-year last year.
And although a number of European car companies have recently significantly expanded their electric portfolio, the title of the best-selling electric car on the old continent has been fairly clearly blown away by the American Tesla. The first is the Model Y SUV with 137,000 units sold, which is actually somewhat European. It has been produced in Berlin’s Gigafactory since last year.
The Model Y edged out the technically related Model 3 sedan, which finished second overall. The most popular European electric car is the third Volkswagen ID.4 in Europe, followed by the Fiat 500 (for which the electric version accounts for 37 percent of total sales) and the Volkswagen ID.3. Škodovce also did well, Enyaq iV jumped one place last year and finished sixth overall with less than 50,000 units. And Jato Dynamics separates the Enyaq and the Enyaq Coupé, of which less than 2,800 units were sold last year.
Take a look at the 25 most popular electric cars in Europe in the gallery at the beginning of the article.
If the number of pure electric cars increased significantly last year, sales of new plug-in hybrids fell for the first time in several years. From 1.04 million in 2021 to 1.02 million in 2022. Let’s recall that there were 0.61 million in 2020 and 0.2 million a year earlier.
The Ford Kuga was the best-selling plug-in hybrid last year with almost 58,000 units. BMW 3 series finished second, Volvo XC40 third, Hyundai Tucson fourth and Volvo XC60 fifth. Škoda Octavia is in 43rd place overall, last year it sold not even 10,000 units in the plug-in hybrid version – that is almost 50 percent less year-on-year.
