Over 50,000 new electric cars registered in Germany over December

The German Federal Motor Transport Authority lists 54,654 new electric cars in its statistics for December. The month was characterised by the short-term announcement of the end of the environmental bonus, which is likely to have led to a spontaneous increase in registrations of electric cars.

The 54,654 electric vehicles registered in December represent an increase of 21.6 per cent compared to November (44,952), but a decrease of 47.6 per cent compared to the previous record month of December 2022 (104,325). After August with 86,649 new electric cars, December was the strongest month of 2023. For the whole year of 2023, 524,219 electric cars were newly registered in the nation.

The overall passenger car market closed December with 241,883 new registrations, down 23 per cent from the same month last year. The market for BEVs and PHEVs fell disproportionately: 58.3 per cent for all vehicles with plugs. Broken down by drive system, the aforementioned 47.6 per cent for battery-electric cars and 74.4 per cent for plug-in hybrids. These totalled 17,894 new registrations in December.

The sharp decline is an effect of the exceptional month of December 2022, when the imminent reduction in the environmental bonus led to many early electric car registrations. The end of the environmental bonus announced a few weeks ago probably came too suddenly to cause an effect on a similar scale again. However, the move will have had a certain influence, as it became clear a few days in advance that the environmental bonus would be cancelled quite ad hoc.

Regarding other drive types, in December, 74,894 new petrol vehicles were registered in Germany, an increase of 16.1% compared to December 2022. 37,403 new diesel vehicles (+10.3%), 1,320 vehicles powered by LPG and 23 vehicles powered by natural gas (+11.4% and -80.5% respectively), and 73,581 hybrids (-33.2%) were also registered. If you exclude the plug-in hybrids mentioned above, 55,687 hybrid vehicles remain without a plug.

Battery-electric cars accounted for around 22.6 per cent of all new car registrations in December and plug-in hybrids around 7.4 per cent. This means that 30 per cent of all newly registered vehicles had a plug. Petrol vehicles were at the same level at 30.1 per cent, 15.5 per cent of new registrations were diesel-powered and 0.01 per cent of new vehicles were gas-powered. Hybrids without plugs accounted for 23 per cent.

kba.de (in German)