Index

2 Number of vehicles

When looking at the flow of global electric vehicle production and sales, China and the United States are the largest producing countries, also standing out in their dominant sales to their home markets, with a respective 91 % and 79 % of EVs produced sold in the country. In contrast, the third largest producer, Germany, only sells 32 % of its EVs domestically. Likewise, South Korea (31 % domestic sales), Japan (34 %), France (32 %), and Spain (5 %) export the majority of electric vehicles produced. In terms of sales, after China, the US and Germany, the UK is the fourth largest vehicle market for electric vehicles. With limited domestic production, it imports 92 % of its new EVs.

About 9.3 million new cars were registered in the EU in 2022, continuing a downward trend from the most recent peak of over 13 million in 2019. Registrations in Europe are dominated by the larger countries; the three largest alone – Germany, France, and Italy – accounted for 59 % of the total (Fig. 2-1).

Germany is the largest vehicle market, currently with a 28 % share of the total EU market. Since reaching a peak of around 3.6 million vehicles in 2019, registrations fell sharply after the outbreak of the coronavirus to 2.5 million in 2021. Germany saw a slight increase of less than one percentage point in 2022. While new registrations in Italy, Spain and the Netherlands have fallen to between 50 % and 60 % of their 2001 levels, Sweden was the only country with new registrations surpassing 2001 levels in 2022, despite a drop following the pandemic (+15 %) (Fig. 2-2).

New car registrations in the luxury segment were 63 % higher in 2022 than in the previous year, while all other segments remained largely unchanged. The SUV segment increased its market share slightly to 47 % (up from 43 % in 2021), and the Mini segment dropped minimally to just under 6 %. About 4.2 million new cars in 2022 were SUVs, over nine times as many as in 2001 (Fig. 2-3, Fig. 2-4).

In 2022, the Toyota Yaris became the most popular car model in Europe, accounting for about 2.9 % of all new vehicle sales. Among the largest manufacturers, only Audi and Mercedes-Benz saw increased registrations, up roughly 5 % each com-pared to 2021 (Fig. 2-6).

There were almost 330,000 new registrations of heavy trucks and buses in the EU in 2022 (Fig. 2-12). Volkswagen notably lost 5 % of its market share for regulated trucks over 7.5 t, and 13 % for unregulated trucks, while Volvo lost 5 % of its market share for unregulated trucks in 2022 compared to the previous year. Other manufacturers filled in this gap, making up 19 % of the new registrations of unregulated trucks in 2022, up from a 1 % share in 2021 (Fig. 2-15).