Electric vehicle uptake is accelerating as consumers turn away from vehicles with internal combustion engines (ICE). Already, more than two-thirds of residents in Oslo, Norway own an EV, heading the world in terms of EVs per capita according to management consultancy McKinsey and, with European nations aiming to ban sales of new ICE vehicles by 2035, the direction of travel is set for an electric future.
McKinsey estimates that EVs will make up 75% of European new car sales by 2030 and the electric vehicle market, in general, is growing with increased sales of two and three-wheeled vehicles in addition to four-wheeled cars.
While Norway has already exceeded this goal, overall electric cars accounted for 17% of Europe’s auto sales in 2021, according to the International Energy Agency. The largest market in Europe by volume of EVs sold is Germany, where electric cars accounted for 25% of new cars sold in 2021. Germany offers some of the highest subsidies in Europe.
The countries with the largest market share for new electric car sales in 2021 in Europe were Norway (86%), Iceland (72%), Sweden (43%), and the Netherlands (30%), followed by France (19%), Italy (9%) and Spain (8%).
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (NEF) estimates that more than 5.6 million EVs were sold in 2021, despite the pandemic. EV tax credits and subsidies along with tightening CO2 regulations and penalties are helping to accelerate adoption. The rate of EV sales is outstripping the deployment of charging stations even as EV makers such as Tesla continue to roll out their own networks of fast chargers.
The EU has declared an ambition of having one million public charging points in 2025, achieving a ratio of 10 EVs per charging station, and aims to have between 3 and 4 million charging points across the continent by 2030 to meet the growing demand that it estimates will see 44 million EVs on European roads.
