Soon nostalgia will be another name for Europe

Well, maybe novelist Angela Carter wasn’t thinking about the EV market in 35 years’ time when she wrote those words. Perhaps broadcaster and writer Clive Anderson’s words are more appropriate to a blog on the European car market and the challenge presented by the emerging markets of Asia and South America:

I remember being in China and realising how irrelevant not even Britain is, but also Europe. We're just another remote country that hardly impinges on some places at all.

Data from our Global EV Tracker shows that the north and west of Europe are doing pretty well on adoption of EVs (we’re talking about battery electric vehicles only - plug-in hybrid vehicles are not consistent with the necessary decarbonisation of the economy, and therefore excluded). 

With 83% annual sales of EVs, Norway has almost completed its journey along the whole length from left to right of the adoption curve. It is now entering the final “laggards” stage of the cycle, whilst - with 49% EV sales - Iceland is through the early majority and about to begin the late majority. 

Many countries are well into the hard yards of the early majority including Denmark and Sweden which are in the high 30s of percentage sales, Finland, the Netherlands and Luxembourg in the low 30s, and Switzerland and Belgium in the low 20s. 

European country progress on the EV technology adoption lifecycle

Meanwhile a whole bunch of countries have now leapt the chasm and have a toehold in the early majority, with between 17 and 20% of sales being EVs. This includes France, Germany and the UK, as well as Portugal, Austria, Ireland and Malta.

In the early adopters stage, countries such as Romania, Slovenia and Latvia are hovering at around 10% market share. But other countries in Eastern and Southern Europe are further back, some much further back - most notably, Spain with 5% market share  and Italy with just 4%. 

Even so, compared with this performance, countries like Brazil and India might look like laggards, somewhere around the levels of Croatia or Czechia, with 1.4% and 2.2% EV market share respectively. 

But taking account of the size of their respective markets - Brazil bought 2.2 million cars in the year to March 2024, whilst India bought 3.6 million - and their pace of growth, we can begin to see why the focus is shifting. 

Monthly sales of EVs in Asia/Europe, thousands (12 month rolling average)

EV sales in India, as well as Thailand and Turkey have already overtaken Spain and Italy. They’re now on course to overtake the Netherlands, Belgium and Sweden who each buy around 10,000 EVs per month - and are on track to do so by the end of the year. That will leave only the UK, France and Germany, which are each selling around 25,000 per month to catch. 

It’s a similar story in Brazil, where sales have recently exploded. Accordingly we’ve shown trends over a shorter timescale and, whereas other countries have rolling 12 month averages, Brazil’s actual month-by-month sales are shown. 

Monthly sales of EVs in S America/Europe (thousands - 12 month rolling av except Brazil)

The Brazilian market appears to be overtaking Spain and Italy, as well as Denmark, a smaller market where EVs are much more popular, and - again - is set to exceed Belgium and the Netherlands (as well as Sweden, not shown) in the coming months. 

4 overseas markets, which are not ideologically wedded to buying European EVs, are therefore on track to buy a combined 40,000 EVs a month later this year, and could exceed the sales of Germany, France and the UK in 2025. 

So it’s madness to assume that we can go at our own pace without losing access to foreign markets. Consumers in the economies of South America and Asia are buying EVs now, and if we in Europe don’t make the right vehicles at the right price they won’t buy them.

If we can only buy a limited amount of time through domestic manufacturing, we need to use it efficiently - innovating and cutting costs to make competition easier, not to build and sell a few more million petrol vehicles. 

Nor is it feasible to ban external competition indefinitely. An economy that gets stuck on internal combustion engines in the long term will be a failing economy, lacking jobs in new industries, higher costs of transport and worse health for its citizens. 

European manufacturers are already starting to feel remote or irrelevant in some of these markets. Without the requisite investment, we can look forward to being nostalgic about them too. 

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