During December, a new milestone was achieved across the West European passenger car market: over 100,000 new passenger cars that entered the 18 market region were pure electric zero emission BEV vehicles according to exclusively compiled data in the next edition of the European Electric Car Report, published by Schmidt Automotive Research. In a traditionally fiscally influenced boosted end of the year where registrations for zero-emission vehicles surge before new tax rules are introduced from the new calendar year across a number of key markets, principally The Netherlands, it lead to a breathtaking 68.9 per cent BEV mix in Dutch new passenger car registrations in December. This was just over two percentage points higher than Norway during the same month. Norway is planning on banning new sales of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2025. The Netherlands is also planning something similar from 2030. However Schmidt Automotive Research understands, that due to The Netherlands being an EU member it can only be a plan or a suggestion but can't be implemented into official national legislation as this would not comply with European Union regulations. The Netherlands boost in December was almost entirely due to the company car benefit in kind tax rates – the key driver in the Dutch market – increasing by a further 4 percentage points from January to 12 per cent for BEVs under €40,000 with the additional value of the vehicle over that boundary being charged at the same maximum 22 per cent level as internal combustion engine vehicles.
Not all data has been collated at the time of writing, with some markets still to publish full-year data, but the combined regional plug-in passenger car market has already exceeded 1.2 million new combined BEV/PHEV plug-in passenger car registrations with over half of those being pure BEV electric cars.
This will be updated once more data is available.
This is just a summary of the European Electric Car Sales Monthly Market Intelligence Report which is published on a monthly basis and are available here.