Filenews 16 December 2024
How car sales move in Europe and what kind of fuel new buyers prefer, especially at a time when automakers' production is adapting to the new data, is the question that Eurostat answers through data.
Eurostat's survey is of particular interest and shows trends in different countries. Despite the increase in recent years, alternatively fuelled passenger cars made up a minority of new passenger car registrations in the EU in 2023, behind petrol and diesel (including hybrids). This is reflected by the share of alternatively fuelled cars among newly registered passenger cars, which in most countries is still below 20%. However, in 2023 the number of battery-electric passenger cars in EU countries alone exceeded 4.4 million which was around 88 times higher than in 2013 and 12 times higher than in 2018. The highest growth rates occurred between 2019 and 2020 (85.2%) and between 2020 and 2021 (77.5%). Their share of total passenger cars increased from 0.02% to 1.7%.
Preferences on whether a new passenger car should run on a petrol, diesel or alternative fuel engine differ across EU countries. Of the 27 EU countries, 26 recorded a higher share of petrol (including hybrids). This is a worsening of the phenomenon observed in 2017 (by 2015, the majority of EU countries recorded a higher share of diesel).
In 2023, in 13 of the 24 EU countries for which information is available, there were more petrol cars than diesel cars (including hybrids), with the share of petrol cars ranging from 85% in the Netherlands to 48% in Italy.
In Cyprus the share of petrol cars is 78.5%, diesel cars 21.1% and the share of cars with alternative fuels is 0.38%. According to Eurostat, in the remaining 11 EU countries, diesel cars outnumbered petrol cars, with their shares ranging from 66% in Latvia and Lithuania to 49% in Slovenia. Despite efforts across Europe to increase the share of low-CO2 cars, the share of passenger cars running on alternative fuels remained low in 2023 in most EU countries.
In 2 of the 24 EU countries for which information is available, passenger cars using alternative energy accounted for less than 1% of the total passenger car fleet. The EU country with the highest share is Bulgaria, where passenger cars powered by alternative fuels reached 14.3% in 2023. Other countries with notable shares of passenger cars using alternative fuels are Norway (23.9%), Italy (10.3%), Sweden (10.1%), Lithuania (7.2%), Denmark (7.1%), Hungary (6.5%), Netherlands (6.1%), Latvia (5.5%) and Luxembourg (5.2%).
In Norway almost all (99.9%) of alternative fuel passenger cars are battery-only electric passenger cars. Also in 16 of the 22 EU countries for which data are available, it can be observed that the share of small petrol engines is higher than the share of medium and large.
Eurostat also says government incentives to boost the share of lower-emitting cars include, for example, tax cuts, subsidies or specific perks such as lane access for public transport and free parking.
