France Electric Car Sales — No Competition, Renault Zoe Crushes It
Originally published on EV Obsession.
It’s one of the electric cars I still haven’t driven and would love to give a spin. The Renault Zoe is dominating electric car sales in its home country of France this year, with its Japanese cousin the Nissan LEAF and sibling the Renault Kangoo ZE coming in a very distant #2 and #3, respectively.
The Zoe comes in at a very competitive price and offers drivers a nice, comfortable, sleek car that blends in but also stands out (if you know what I mean). I imagine fleet sales also boost the electric car a bit.
Considering that France is the second-largest electric car market in Europe (only trailing electric car rock star Norway), that’s quite a feat to dominate sales like it does. If it could land decent sales in a couple of other countries, I think it could really compete for the European crown — but it doesn’t seem to land many of those for some reason, whether the fault is on Renault or buyers simply don’t fancy it that much in other countries and given the incentives available there.
In fact, if you take a look at both the June and January-through-June electric car registrations for France (below), you can see that more people registered the Renault Zoe in June than registered the #2 Nissan LEAF from January through June!
Anyway, moving on to the rest of the cars, the next three are quite tight, but a decent step above the rest. They are the LEAF, Renault Kangoo ZE, and Volkswagen Golf GTE (which is proving extremely popular in Germany). The rest of the cars on the list have seen pretty lame sales, so I’ll leave it to their makers to discuss and explain. To have a look at the details yourself, here are a couple of charts and a table (thanks to José Pontes for the numbers*):
*Note that these registration numbers require some assumptions and are not all from an official source. I’ve tried to track down complete numbers in the past, but the nature of the beast these days is that they just aren’t available. I’ve also found mistakes and odd assumptions in José’s numbers in the past, but they are still far and away the best I have found aggregated on the internet. So, be cautious with how you use these sales statistics, but the general picture should be accurate and useful.
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