Petrol, diesel and plug-in hybrid on return
The European trade association ACEA has reviewed the car sales of the past quarter. Fully electric cars are once again gaining ground, but perhaps more strikingly, the share of newly sold diesel cars has shrunk only marginally.
In the third quarter of this year, around 2.65 million units were sold in Europe, about as many new cars as last year. This was already apparent from figures from Jato last month. Now the ACEA has released the figures for the European Union and is examining the representation of the different drivetrain forms. As it turns out: in the EU, the share of all-electric car sales grew to 11.9 percent in Q3 from 2022, from 9.8 percent in the same quarter last year. In absolute numbers, sales of BEVs grew by 22 percent.
Hybrid cars (without plugs) account for a share of 22.6 percent, which was 21.2 percent last year in Q3. So a slightly more modest growth. Plug-in hybrid cars are losing some ground, they had a share of 8.5 percent in sales in the past quarter, compared to 9 percent last year.
Source: ACEA
Diesel share barely shrinks
The growth in the sales share of fully electric cars is therefore logically to a small extent at the expense of plug-in hybrid cars, but not surprisingly, sales of cars with only a fuel engine are also declining. Petrol cars accounted for a 37.3 percent share of sales, compared to 39.3 percent last year. In absolute numbers, sales fell by 3.3 percent. Petrol cars still account for the majority of new cars sold.
4.7 percent fewer diesel cars were sold in Q3 than in that quarter in 2021, but in terms of sales share, the contraction is smaller than for petrol cars. Diesel cars accounted for 16.5 percent of sales last quarter, up from 17.5 percent last year. So a percent less, where petrol cars have lost 2 percent of the market share. Although it is a small contraction in both cases, it is particularly striking that EU-wide diesel does not get such a hard knock. After all, in the Netherlands, diesel is on its way to the exit (partly due to the high diesel prices) and the sales share in the first nine months of this year was only 1.7 percent. In other EU countries, demand is clearly still quite high, big enough to keep diesel in third place in EU sales in terms of drive form.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl