For more than 30 years, Jato Dynamics has provided precision data on changes within the car market and their reports always make for interesting reading. Today's update includes a summary of new vehicle registrations from across Europe for June 2021. With the pandemic seemingly well behind us now, the patterns are becoming clear – with a strong emphasis on electric vehicles. WhichEV powers up the spreadsheet and checks the graphs.
Overall sales of 1.27 million vehicles is slightly down on the 1.47 new vehicles million registered in 2019, but it does mean that sales for the first half of the year finished up 27% compared to the start of 2020.
Pure battery electric vehicles totalled 126,000 units – around 25% ahead of the PHEV collective with 104,000 registrations.
It will come as little surprise that the companies with the strongest EV offerings did best in the sales charts – especially Tesla, the VW group and Ford. While the overall best seller in Europe is the evergreen VW Golf at 27,247 units, Tesla was right behind them with 25,697 sales of the Model 3.
In terms of form factor, SUVs still make up the bulk of all sales with over 44% of the market, then Compact (15%) and Sub-Compact (18%) make up the next 33%. Convenient City Cars (7.6%) and Mid-Sized (6.9%) also make up a significant amount of the sales volume. The headline grabbing luxury segment (including certain models from Porsche), now accounts for only 0.2% of sales volume. You have to wonder if the ‘thrill seeking money' has been moving (largely) across to the much quicker, high end EVs.
Back in 2011, Clarkson and May controversially drove a pair of first generation EVs across Lincolnshire. At the time, the council folks interviewed didn't know the location of a single public charger, so an emergency fill-up meant someone passing you a standard power cable through a window. The latest Jato data shows clearly just how much momentum the EV market has picked up over the last couple of years. The increase in EV sales is enormous, taking revenue from both the petrol and diesel markets.
Today's data release – alongside the earlier announcement that the UK Government is looking for a ten-fold increase in public chargers – will only drive an ever faster move away from fossil fuels, toward a greener, healthier tomorrow.
Even a small increase in ‘EV intention' from the major manufacturers has made it easy to see how there will be millions of EVs on the streets within 3 years.