Europe reaches milestone of one million battery EVs sold in 2021

Western Europe has passed the milestone one million battery electric vehicles (BEV) sold in a year, with every tenth car a full BEV, and every fifth car a plug in of some sort, according to the latest data.

Leading auto analyst Matthias Schmidt, who authors the European Electric Car Report, said that based on provisional data for November, Western Europe broke through the 1 million BEV registrations with a month to spare.

Schmidt predicts tha Western Europe is likely to finish the year almost half a million units ahead of 2020s full-year volumes of BEVs registered of 727,900.

Market penetration for BEVs in Western Europe was 10.4%, while adding plug-in hybrid EVs (PHEVs) to the equation takes the figure up to 20%. The combined BEV and PHEV numbers have seen 1.94 million plug-in units registered so far this year, with Schmidt predicting that “the forecast over 2 million units now all but a procedure.”

Germany is the largest market for plug-in vehicles in Western Europe, accounting for 31% of new plug-in registrations so far this year, double that of the next largest market, the United Kingdom, which accounted for 13.9%.

“BEV volumes increased significantly in 2020 due to the sharpened EU mass-adjusted CO2 fleet average targets increasing from 130 g/km (NEDC) from 2015-2019, to 95 g/km in 2020,” explained Schmidt.

According to Schmidt, a large number of manufacturers used up this allowance in 2020, meaning that more BEVs had to be registered in 2021 in order to reach the CO2 targets.