In Northern Europe, electric cars are often the first choice when buying a car. In the south, however, they barely play a role in market share. The figures of the European manufacturers’ association ACEA show how extremely uneven the distribution of electric cars is in Europe.
There are various reasons for this, but above all there are incentives for buying electric cars. Thus, in Germany, the purchase bonus brought a significant breakthrough of electric cars to the market, so in this country one of six new cars is an EV.
The situation is similar in Great Britain (16.6 percent) and France (16.8 percent), while the share of EVs is significantly higher in Denmark (36.3 percent), the Netherlands (30.8 percent), Sweden (38, 7 percent) and, of course, with an enormous lead in Norway (82.4 percent).
A completely different picture of EV sales can be seen in Italy, Spain, Poland, and especially in Southeast Europe, he says Klix.ba.
1.3 million new cars are registered in Italy every year, making them the fourth largest market in Europe. However, last year only 4.2 percent of that number were electric vehicles. That’s just one in every 24 new cars. It is similar in Spain, which with 813,000 new registrations per year ranks fifth among European markets, but has a share of EVs of only 5.4 percent.
In some countries of Southeast Europe, electric cars are even less widespread. Thus, Hungary has a share of 5.3 percent, Bulgaria – 4.8 percent and Poland – 3.6 percent. However, Croatia with 2.8 percent and Slovakia with 2.7 percent share of EVs in the new car market are at the absolute bottom of the EU statistics. This means that in these countries only one car out of every 37 new cars is electric.
The result is that on average across the EU, purely electric cars account for only 14.6 percent of all new registrations. All other new cars still have an internal combustion engine under the hood (including hybrids).
Lack of purchase incentives cannot be used as a general explanation for these results, as many countries with a low share of EVs had subsidies similar to Germany, and in some cases even higher. On the other hand, in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, you will not receive a single cent of incentive when buying an EV.
In addition to incentives, the biggest reason for weak EV sales is the charger network. Greece, for example, had around 2,000 public chargers in 2024. Bulgaria has 1,600 chargers, Romania 2,700. These are all modest numbers because, by comparison, the tiny Netherlands has 144,000 chargers. This also explains where and why e-mobility is progressing and where it is still at a standstill.
Source: Klix.ba
Photo: Arhiva Autoblog.rs / Volkswagen
Source: autoblog.rs
