EV Market Share Growth in 16 Lagging European Countries

I recently explored the market share growth of electric vehicles in 15 European countries where electric vehicles have become most popular. From 15.9% market share for plugin vehicles in Ireland to 86.1% market share for plugin vehicles in Norway, those countries are racing into the mass market stage of new tech adoption (plugin vehicle adoption). In terms of full electric vehicles (BEVs), the range in market share ranged from 5.7% in Belgium to 64.5% in Norway. Those are the 15 leaders of the EV transition in Europe — and just add China for the list of the top 16 countries globally. How about the rest of Europe?

One of the most exciting things about growth of EV market share in Europe is how widespread it is. Rather than seeing rapid growth in just 3 or 4 countries, the growth crosses the continent. Of course, this is largely due to EU-wide requirements for automakers to lower the CO2 emissions of the vehicles the sell or pay huge fines. The EV sales growth isn’t uniform across Europe, though. If you go east or south, the market share of EVs in those countries drops off significantly. That said, we’re also seeing steep growth of EV market share in those Eastern European and Southern European countries as well — it’s just more akin to what you see in the United States than in the Netherlands. Let’s have a stroll through these 16 remaining markets and see what’s been happening.

Note that the time period for these analyses goes from 2012 through 2021, and this report examines both the plugin vehicle market as a whole and the fully battery-electric vehicle market. If you only care about BEVs, you are free to ignore the purple bar charts. We’ll start with those plugin vehicle charts and save the best for last.

If you want to see fun, exciting, more useful interactive charts and graphs, you can find those on CleanTechnica Pro. Here’s the direct link to that article.

From this group of European countries, Italy is the clear leader (9.5% of new vehicle registrations in 2021 being plugin vehicle registrations). It is followed by a strong second tier of Spain, Romania, Hungary, and Greece — ranging from 7% plugin vehicle share in 2021 (Greece and Hungary tied on that) to 7.7% (Romania) and 7.8% (Spain). Then you’ve got a big bulk of sitting between 2.8% and 4.2% plugin vehicle share. Then there’s Cyprus and Turkey — no comment.

You can see from the bar charts above that aside from a few outliers (especially Estonia and Latvia), these countries have seen consistent EV sales growth, and especially rapid growth in the past couple of years — similar to the top 15 countries noted at the top. Estonia, Latvia, and a couple of others simply had some subsidy-inspired success years ago that their charts look odd.

You can also see bar charts for individual countries over on CleanTechnica Pro. Above is an example for the Czech Republic.

That was plugin vehicles. It’s not all the same when you focus on full electrics (BEVs). Relatively speaking, Italy, Spain, and Greece do not do as well here (4.6%, 2.8%, and 2.2% BEV share, respectively). Romania (5.2% BEV share) excels and leads the charts in this competition.

The biggest takeaways are that BEV sales spiked in all of these markets in the past two years and they have reached the level that the top 15 countries were at a few years ago.

Again, you can also see bar charts for individual countries over on CleanTechnica Pro. Above is an example for the Czech Republic. You can also find interactive versions of all of the other charts there.

Related story: 15 European Countries Have 15%+ Plugin Vehicle Sales (New Car Sales)