I recently researched the market share growth of electric vehicles in 15 European countries where electric vehicles have become the most popular. From 15.9% market share for plug-in vehicles in Ireland to 86.1% market share for plug-in vehicles in Norway, those countries are rushing to the mass market stage of new technology adoption (plug-in vehicle adoption). In the case of full electric vehicles (BEVs), the volume of market share ranged from 5.7% in Belgium to 64.5% in Norway. These are the 15 leaders of the EV transition in Europe – and only add China to the list of the top 16 countries worldwide. What about the rest of Europe?
One of the most exciting things about the growth of EV market share in Europe is how widespread it is. Rather than seeing rapid growth in just 3 or 4 countries, the growth stretches the continent. Of course, this is largely due to EU-wide requirements for car manufacturers to reduce the CO2 emissions of the vehicles they sell or pay big points. However, EV sales growth is not uniform in Europe. If you go east or south, the market share of EVs in those countries drops significantly. That said, we are also seeing sharp growth in EV market share in those Eastern European and Southern European countries – it’s just more similar to what you see in the United States than in the Netherlands. Let’s walk through these 16 remaining markets and see what happened.
Note that the period for these analyzes extends from 2012 to 2021, and this report examines both the plug-in vehicle market as a whole and the fully battery-electric vehicle market. If you only care about BEVs, you’re free to ignore the purple bar graphs. We will start with those plug-in vehicle cards and best for last storage.
If you want to see fun, exciting, more useful interactive maps and graphs, you can find them on CleanTechnica Pro. Here is the direct link to that article.
Out of this group of European countries, Italy is the clear leader (9.5% of new vehicle registrations in 2021 are plug-in vehicle registrations). This is followed by a strong second tier from Spain, Romania, Hungary and Greece – ranging from 7% plug-in vehicle share in 2021 (Greece and Hungary linked to it) to 7.7% (Romania) and 7.8% (Spain) . Then you have a large majority of put between 2.8% and 4.2% propin vehicle share. Then there is Cyprus and Turkey – no comment.
You can see from the bar graphs above that, apart from a few outliers (especially Estonia and Latvia), these countries have seen consistent growth in EV sales, and especially rapid growth in the last few years – similar to the top 15 countries that at the Top. Estonia, Latvia and a few others simply had some subsidized-inspired success years ago that made their cards look strange.
You can also view bar graphs for individual countries CleanTechnica Pro. Above is an example for the Czech Republic.
These were plug-in vehicles. It’s not all the same when you focus on full electrical (BEVs). Relatively speaking, Italy, Spain and Greece are not doing so well here (4.6%, 2.8% and 2.2% BEV share respectively). Romania (5.2% BEV share) excels and leads the charts in this competition.
The biggest takeaway is that BEV sales have increased in all of these markets over the past two years, reaching the level of the top 15 countries a few years ago.
Again, you can also see bar graphs for individual countries CleanTechnica Pro. Above is an example for the Czech Republic. You can also find interactive versions of all the other maps there.
Related story: 15 European countries have 15% + plug-in vehicle sales (new car sales)
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