The Volkswagen e-up! is one of the cheapest electric vehicles on the market. Throw in the usual operational savings of an electric car and you end up with a compelling total cost of ownership. Consumers are starting to catch on. Volkswagen reports that approximately 50% of up! sales in Germany are now e-up! sales.
Yes, the Swedish electric vehicle market is an odd one in which approximately 80% of electric vehicle sales are plug-in hybrids, leaving only 20% of the market for fully electric vehicles. Most EV markets are around 50–50 or favor fully electric vehicles (BEVs). Nonetheless, an overall EV market share of 26% is a stunning achievement in early 2020.
Following the start of the EU’s new CO2 rules, the German plug-in market has (finally) clicked and February signaled another record performance, its second in a row, having registered 16,508 units in February.
The European passenger plug-in vehicle (PEV) market scored a near-record 75,000 registrations in December (+121%!), this being the first time since 2015 that the European PEV market scored a three-digit growth rate, with plug-in hybrids/PHEVs growing faster (+174% year over year, or YoY) than fully electric vehicles/BEVs (+89%), with the powertrain breakdown becoming more balanced between both.
After the December sales peak, January signaled the expected sales hangover in China, but with some 49,000 passenger plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), the numbers were worse than expected, as sales fell 50% year over year (YoY).
The German plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) market started the year on fire, jumping 128% year over year (YoY), to a record 16,131 registrations. That smashed the previous record (12,026 units) set last October, so it seems the German locomotive has (finally) been set in motion.
January saw fossil fuel passenger vehicle sales plummet in Sweden by almost 40% year on year, with diesels more than halved, as plug-in vehicle market share climbed to over 30%. Sweden’s auto industry organization expects 30% to be maintained through the full year of 2020.
Experiments in Ohio and Hamburg are designed to determine whether repurposing EV batteries for energy storage is technically and commercially viable.
The German plug-in electric passenger vehicle market ended the year on fire, with registrations more than doubling in December, to 11,328 registrations.
Led by the Tesla Model 3, December had an amazing 22,983 plug-in registrations, a three-fold increase compared to the same month last year, finally beating one of the oldest records in modern EV history, the 15,879 units sold in the Netherlands in December 2016.
