Top 14 European Countries In EV Market Share — Sales From 2012–2020 (Charts)

I recently published a report on the top 5 countries in terms of plugin vehicle market share (percentage of their auto sales coming from plugin vehicle sales). Underneath that article, some readers requested that I do a report focused only on fully electric vehicles. I thought that was a good idea, so here’s a report on that topic.

However, note that I focused only on Europe. If it was a global report, China would have made it onto this list as well, tied with Ireland just outside of the top 10 at #11 in 2020, and South Korea might have also made it onto the list.

I decided to make 3% market share in 2020 the cutoff for this report. As you can see in the title, 14 European countries made that cutoff. Two of those countries have more than 30% fully electric vehicle (BEV) market share so far in 2020, five have between 5% and 9%, and the remaining seven have 3% to 5% BEV market share. Have a look at how things break out in the following interactive charts below. (Note that these charts do not play well with some mobile devices.)

In the interactive graph below, note that you can hover over a line in the graph to see it highlighted and can also hover over any particular year for a specific country/line.

In the interactive chart below, you can use the drop-down button to select a country and then can see a bar chart of BEV market share from 2012 to H1 2020.

Norway is clearly in a league of its own, as we’ve known for years. One out of every two new cars sold in the country are now fully electric (and the figure is better than two out of three for plugin vehicles of all kinds).

However, I think Iceland probably comes as a surprise to many, with 31% meaning nearly one out of every three new car sales are fully electric car sales, a large portion of which are sales the Tesla Model 3.

The other 5 that have 5–9% BEV market share are again rather wealthy countries — the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Portugal, and Switzerland. Portugal is basically the odd one out there.

While these figures are quite good compared to previous years, I do expect them to bounce further in the coming year. Though, the rest of 2020 is still a bit unpredictable due to the coronavirus and resulting economic challenges. I will do another check-in report at the end of the 3rd quarter and at the end of 2020.

Thanks to the European Alternative Fuels Observatory for the data, and thanks to a commenter, “No way,” for reminding me of this source while politely pointing out that I had neglected to include Finland in my previous report on the top countries in terms of plugin vehicle market share.