Electric Cars and Hybrids hit record sales across Europe

Electrified car sales – that’s BEVs, Plug-in Hybrids and ‘Self-Charging’ Hybrids – reached record numbers across Europe in March with sales of 125,400

Europe’s new cars sales – which includes the UK – dropped in March for the seventh month in a row, but the decline of 3.2 per cent wasn’t a huge drop on 2018, although of the 27 markets included by JATO in the figures, all but eight posted a decline, with the UK down a very average 3.4 per cent.

What is significant is the ongoing decline of diesel-engined car sales, with a market share of just 31.2 per cent. It wasn’t that long ago that figure was over 50 per cent, and as recently as 2017 it stood at almost 45 per cent.

But, although still not massive actual numbers, the sales of electrified cars – which includes BEVs, plug-in hybrids and regular hybrids – rose significantly, passing the 100k mark for the first time, and doing it comfortably with sales of 125,400.

A chunk of that was down to the Tesla Model 3, which managed to get 15,755 new EVs to European buyers (although it’s not yet available in the UK), in the process becoming the 25th best-selling brand across the continent.

Felipe Munoz, JATO Analyst, said:

It was always going to be a challenge to maintain the growth rate we’ve seen in recent years thanks to recent events such as WLTP and legislation around diesel, as well as the impending CO₂ targets. Despite the negative trend we’ve been seeing since September last year, the market is still strong in terms of volume and offer. In fact, a slow-down after many years of growth is not bad at all.

Interestingly, the growth of SUV sales slowed a bit (although it’s hardly stalled) rising ‘just’ 5 per cent, with the increase coming from small and compact SVs, with sales of bigger SUVs actually down.