The Turbulent European Car Market: Rise of Electrified Cars and Czech Republic’s Adoption Struggles

The European car market has been turbulent and experiencing radical changes in recent years. In this year 2023, the first quarter is already behind us and information and business results from new car sales are starting to appear. In the first quarter, a total of 2,650,711 new cars were registered in the countries of the European Union, thanks to which the market improved by 17.9 percent year-on-year. And during recent years, the tastes of customers have also changed, and they are increasingly interested in more modern electrified cars.

Traditional fuels, on the other hand, are gradually declining. Since 2017, interest in the once very successful diesel engines has been declining every year. In the last approximately seven years, their market share has been regularly decreasing from the original approximately 47 percent to today’s 12.11 percent. To put it simply – interest in diesels is now about a quarter. During the same period, sales of gasoline engines also fell – from some 47 percent in 2017 to 37.41 percent this year. But even this has not yet threatened the position of gasoline cars as the most popular in Europe overall.

Customers are increasingly opting for electrified models, of which the most successful are conventional hybrids (HEVs) and battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Interest in purely electric cars grew by 43.2 percent year-on-year, when 320,987 passenger electric cars were registered in the European Union during the first quarter of this year. The least popular type of electrically powered cars are plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), whose sales share has recently fallen by 3.6 percent to just 7.14.

Electromobility is on the rise in Europe, but one of the slowest countries in its adoption is the Czech Republic. During the first three months of this year, 1,338 new personal battery electric cars were sold in our country, and the Czech market improved by a huge 70.5 percent year-on-year. In reality, however, we are the second least “successful” country in Europe, with only neighboring Slovakia behind us.

The most successful manufacturer of electric cars in our country these days is the American Tesla, whose significant price reductions understandably have a positive effect on overall sales. Since the beginning of the year, it has sold 300 new electric cars in the Czech Republic this year, of which the Model Y is the best-selling model with 220 vehicles. The second most registered electric car is Škoda Enyaq iV (203 cars) and competitor Hyundai Kona (93 cars).

Even though Czech interest in electromobility is growing, it is still significantly lower than in the rest of Europe. Of the total European market share, the penultimate Czech Republic accounts for only 2.4 percent, while it has only a small lead over the last Slovakia with a 1.8 percent share. In the first quarter of this year, the Czech market for new passenger cars was the eleventh largest, and for electric cars it was the eighteenth.