Again and again and again and again
Daily Mail December 2000
Mail Online April 2024
Some people get a bit carried away … repeatedly.
Rather than it being the end of EVs, sales of battery electric cars are still increasing in the vast majority of markets, and in some markets extremely fast. (We are talking pure battery electric vehicles - plug-in hybrids, which are less efficient and have tailpipe emissions, exacerbating climate change, are not included.)
As shown by our Global EV Tracker - which offers month-by-month coverage of 39 markets responsible for more than 80% of total car sales - the volume of battery electric car sales in the year to March 2024 is up on the preceding 12 months in 37 of them.
The only 2 in which sales are down are Croatia and Norway. Croatia is one of the smallest markets in our study, only buying 5,000 new cars of any kind a month, whilst Norway has seen falls in vehicle sales of all types and the market share of battery electric go up.
But maybe by comparing the last 12 months with the previous 12 months we miss important trends, and people really are giving up and electing to stick with space hoppers, pogo sticks and unicycles? Nope.
Quarterly battery electric vehicles sales by continent*
[* We don’t yet report on any African markets, although we are working on it.]
It’s true that there has been a quarter-on-quarter decline in sales in 2024. But there was a similar quarterly decline in sales in Q1 2023, with sales bouncing back strongly in Q2 and hitting levels 70% higher by Q4 of last year. Total EV sales are down in Q1 of 2024, but are up more than 15% up on the same quarter last year.
We see a similar pattern in the year before. In 2022, the lowest reported EV sales were in Q1 - they then increased steeply through quarters 2, 3 and 4 of that year.
So - as with so many dire stories about EV sales - we appear to be in danger of mistaking a seasonal trend for a secular shift. So no signs of consumers giving up on EVs yet - unlike that pesky Internet that the Daily Mail’s campaign finally got rid of back in the early noughties. I’m so glad we didn’t get saddled with that.
It’s also worth noting that total sales of battery electric cars in the past 4 quarters from the markets we cover are 10.4 million. Whilst The Times was writing that 10 million sales wouldn’t be reached until 2025, it had already been reached. Unfortunate.
Let’s unpack the fall in the past quarter a bit to verify our theory that this is a seasonal effect.
The biggest driver of the dip is China, where the trend is clearly seasonal. There were similar dips in Q1 of 2021, 2022 and 2023, and each time the market bounced back higher.
Monthly Battery Electric Vehicle sales in China / millions
If you adjust for these seasonal variations by plotting a 12 month rolling average, you can see a pretty consistent rise - average monthly battery electric sales are above 550,000 a month now. There’s a slightly reduced incline in the past couple of months, but that’s visible in 2023 too.
And any slowdown is not really detectable in market share. Sales of all fuel types dip in the early months of the year in China, so battery electric market share is holding up well this year - now at more than 26% - just as it has done in other years.
Market share of petrol/diesel, plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles in China
Turning to Europe, battery electric sales increased very marginally from Q1 of 2023 to Q1 of 2024, driven by increased volumes in the UK, France and Benelux countries. They fell in the Nordics, but sales of other fuel types in those countries again fell faster - giving battery electric vehicles increased market share.
Quarterly battery electric vehicle sales in Europe
The main driver of the EV slowdown in Europe was falling sales in Germany, which declined 15% - a result of the immediate withdrawal of incentives in December 2023, following a budget crisis caused by a court ruling that the German Government was not able to deploy Covid recovery funds to a climate transformation fund - which included EV subsidies.
If there’s a surefire way of stalling your domestic market, it’s the sudden withdrawal of incentives. Consumers will make a buying decision based not only on the value of the goods on offer, but what they could or would have paid previously. “25% off” stickers attract interest, whereas “25% on” stickers are rarer than hydrogen fuel cells.
We can hope for a recovery in Germany, but it is likely to require additional efforts both by manufacturers to drum up demand, and by Government to restore public confidence. But this is an exception - sales rose 6% in the rest of Europe in Q1 2024 on the same period last year.
And even if sales don’t recover in Germany, the trend looks - at least from today’s perspective - to be on and on and on, and up and up and up. So best not to believe everything one reads in the media. Although if you’d believed that article back in 2000, you wouldn’t be reading this.
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