One in 11 cars sold in Europe in 2021 were fully electric

Electrified vehicles witnessed a highly impressive sales performance in Europe in 2021, reveals data by European Automobile Manufacturers' Association. The data also reveals that one in every 11 cars sold in the continent last year was an electric car. Also, this was the first time when non-plug-in hybrid cars outsold the diesel models in Europe for the first time, albeit by just 48 vehicles.

The data reveals that electric vehicles sold just under 880,000 units last year in Europe. The plug-in hybrid cars sold just barely behind battery electric vehicles in 2021.

A total of 1,901,239 self-charging hybrid cars were registered in the European Union throughout last year. This marked a significant jump from the 1.1 million self-charging hybrid cars registered in 2020. The data shows that diesel car registrations slumped by a third to 1,901,191 from the 2.77 million units recorded in 2020. The diesel car registrations have been facing a continuous dip in numbers since the Dieselgate scandal in 2015.

New government subsidies for low or zero-emission vehicles that came into effect as part of pandemic recovery programs trebled sales of plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicle sales in 2020 to over one million, with a roughly even split between the two types.

The automakers see the plug-in hybrid technology as a mode of transition to fully electric cars. However, data shows that automakers and consumers still rely more on the internal combustion engine over the battery. This makes electric cars effectively less clean than they could be.

In 2021, battery-electric vehicle sales increased by 63.1 per cent to nearly 878,500 cars, while plug-in hybrid sales grew 70.7 per cent to nearly 867,100 units. Petrol remained the most common fuel type but by a lower margin than 2020, constituting 40 per cent of new registrations, down from 48 per cent in 2020.