Germany overtakes Norway as third largest e-mobility market
Clean Energy Wire
Germany is rising to become the world’s third largest electromobility market, having outpaced Norway for the first time in absolute sales figures in 2019, the Center of Automotive Management’s (CAM) newest Electromobility Report says. While the German automobile market largely stagnated overall during the first half of 2019, newly registered electric vehicles saw an increase of 41 percent – from 34,000 in June 2018 to 48,000 today. This, however, still only makes up a market share of 2,6 percent. Globally, electromobility “continues to gain momentum in 2019 despite a decline in overall registration figures in key automotive markets,” the report says. “It is striking that e-vehicle sales are already able to tackle a generally declining overall market,” says study director Stefan Bratzel in a press release. However, he notes that “the dynamics are based on the pure electric vehicles, while the sales figures of plug-in hybrids are currently declining." This is true in Germany as well, where sales of pure electric vehicles are up 80 percent to 31,000 cars, while plug-in hybrids are down 0.9 percent to 16,500 cars in total. Bratzel says “electric mobility is about to make its breakthrough in the core automotive markets, but we expect this from 2020 onwards.”
In January 2019, around 83,000 pure electric passenger cars and 340,000 hybrid passenger cars were registered in Germany. In comparison, a total of 47 million passenger cars were registered in 2018, according to the Federal Motor Transport Authority (Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt). Passenger cars are the major culprit for emissions in Germany’s transportation sector, accounting for more than half of total transport emissions. Germany is nowhere near its official target of putting a million electric vehicles on the road by 2020, and the transport sector is the key reason why the country will miss its 2020 climate goal.
