Business 22 March 2024, 1:55pm

Electric cars are not exactly selling like hot cakes in the EU

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The European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA) has released the latest European car sales statistics, showing, among other things, that petrol cars are still the most popular in Europe, and if you add diesel cars, one in two new passenger cars registered has only an internal combustion engine. One in eight cars sold is electric, which is unchanged from a year ago, i.e. their share has not increased. Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands have a high share of pure electric cars in their sales, while in the Central and Eastern European region, Slovenia, Croatia, and Slovakia sold very few electric cars in the second month of the year.

In February 2024, the EU car market surged by 10.1% compared to the same month last year, reaching 883,608 units.

Among the four major EU markets, France (+13%) and Italy (+12.8%) grew by double-digits, with Spain (+9.9%) and Germany (+5.4%) following. Hungary recorded a 10.4% growth to 10,735 cars.

In the first two months of this year, car registrations grew by 11.2% to 1.7 million units. The bloc’s major markets recorded solid growth, with Germany (+11.8%), Italy (+11.7%), France (+11.2%), and Spain (+8.7%) recording high single-digit or double-digit gains. Hungary had 18,775 new passenger cars registered, 4.1% more than in the first two months of 2023.

The chart below shows the number of new passenger car registrations in Central and Eastern Europe in the second month of 2023 and 2024, as well as their yr/yr change. Apart from Romania, all of the selected countries recorded yr/yr increases in February, with Poland standing out in terms of the number of new cars registered.

New EU car registrations by power source

In February, battery-electric cars held a market share of 12% (stable compared to February 2023), while hybrid-electric cars captured nearly 29%.

The combined market share of petrol and diesel cars was 48.4% in February 2024, a decrease from 51.9% last year.

In contrast, the share of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) in Hungary is much higher at 47.1% than the combined share of petrol and diesel cars (40.8%).

In Bulgaria, almost only petrol and diesel cars are sold, but in both the Czech Republic and Slovenia the share of cars with only internal combustion engines is over 70%, while in Finland only one in five cars sold are of this type.

Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are becoming increasingly popular around the world, and this is also true in Europe, where 29% of new cars are HEVs, and in Lithuania, Hungary and Poland, almost half of new cars are hybrids.

HEV sales in Hungary jumped by 33.1% to over 5,000 cars, which compares with a 24.7% average growth in the EU.

Electric cars

It is obvious that everyone is giving priority to pure electric cars, and the first columns of the ACEA tables are not for the much higher selling petrol or hybrid cars, but battery electric vehicles (BEVs). But given their market weight, this should not be the case, as their share has remained virtually unchanged from a year earlier at 12% in February this year.

That is, only one in eight new cars sold in Europe is purely electric.

Slightly more than 106,000 new BEVs were registered in February, while total new passenger car registrations reached almost 884,000 units. Among the four largest markets, Belgium (+66.9%), France (+31.8%), and the Netherlands (+20.9%) saw significant double-digit gains, while registrations in Germany, where a state subsidy programme was called off, declined by 15.4%.

The highest share of battery electric cars is in Denmark, where almost one in two new cars sold is now BEV, but the share is also high in Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland. At the bottom of the list are the countries of our region, with hardly any BEVs sold in Croatia, the Czech Republic or Slovakia, and the big markets of Italy and Spain have not caught on to electric cars. In Hungary, 741 electric cars were sold in February, a share of 6.9%.

BEV sales in Hungary were up 17.2% yr/ry in February, almost double the EU average.

Looking a little further outside the European Union, we still see brutal numbers in Norway, for example, where 6,647 electric cars were sold in February, compared to 7,380 for the total market, meaning that

in Norway, 9 out of 10 new cars are now pure electric.

In terms of the share of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) of total new car registrations, Sweden came out on top with 23.9%, followed by Finland and Belgium. Hungary's share in this category was 5.1% in February, while the EU average was higher at 7.3%.

Only 545 PHEVs were newly registered in Hungary in February, versus 548 in the same month of 2022. This 0.5% contraction compares with a 11.6% average growth in the EU.

Hungary and its regional peers

A total of 10,735 new passenger cars were registered in Hungary in February, 10.4% more than in a year earlier. Most new cars are HEVs (47.1%), followed by petrol (30.5%), diesel (10.3%), BEV (6.9%) and PHEV (5.1%). The evolution of these shares can be seen in the chart below. The race is clearly between HEVs and petrol cars, with the former coming out on top steadily since last July. The share of HEVs was also higher between November 2022 and May 2023.

As for the evolution of the share of the three main power sources (petrol, diesel, HEV) in Hungary's new passenger car registrations take a look at the three graphs below. The diminishing share of petrol engines year by year is evident.

The share of diesel cars shows fluctuations.

The share of HEVs was the highest in December 2022, but we're slowly getting there again.

As for the yr/yr increase in sales, HEVs showed the highest figure (+33.1%), followed by BEVs (+17.2%), and diesel (+7.1%), while there was a 10.1% decline in the registration of new petrol cars.

We can compare Hungary's performance also in regional terms, both in respect of the actual number of cars sold (by fuel type) and the annual change in new registrations. Here we go: