The race for EV market share is under way
Last year, the UK government fired the starting gun on the biggest race in the history of the car industry. By 2030, all new cars sold in the UK must either be fully electric, or a hybrid that is able to travel a significant distance with zero emissions.
Who is winning?
At New AutoMotive, we’re creating a new data series that will publish statistics each month on the state of the switch to electric vehicles. The data comes from the DVLA’s vehicle enquiry service API, which provides a connection to the vehicle licensing database - the legal record of what can legally be driven on UK roads. This gives us access to details of all UK registered vehicles, on a nearly live basis.
Digging into the data, we can see that since the start of 2020 there has been a significant shift in the composition of the market for new fully electric vehicles. The chart below shows the market share of the top 20 UK car sellers since 2018.
Share of BEV sales among top 20 UK selling car makes
The story of 2020 is one of diversification. In 2019, very few car companies had a claim to significant market share, and the market was dominated by Nissan.
If we look at the cumulative number of BEVs registered, we can see that 2020 saw a slew of OEMs enter the market. (We also see Tesla’s UK sales going off like a rocket.)
Cumulative BEV registrations by top 20 selling car makes
The data can also tell us something important about every car manufacturer. As they face one of the biggest changes in their history: the shift away from the internal combustion engine and towards zero emissions vehicles, the data tells us the progress that each company is making towards an all-electric future. If Tesla is anything to go by, the companies that move the fastest may be favoured by investors.
So how can we judge who is winning the EV race?
The answer is: by looking at the share of new stock that is fully electric. Below, we calculate the share of each car company’s new registrations that are fully electric. This is done for the top ten most popular car makes in the UK. April 2020 was a strange month for many reasons - in the first lockdowns new car registrations fell to extreme lows, meaning that registrations of new Nissan Leafs could, with small movements in the numbers, account for more than 70% of newly registered Nissan cars that month.
Percentage of new stock that is fully electric, for each of the top 10 UK makes
Taking just the registrations in January and February of 2021, we can create a league table that shows which of the top 10 UK car companies by new registrations sell the most EVs as a portion of their new stock. (If Tesla were in the top 10 companies, it would be a flat line along the top of that graph, since 100% of its cars are electric.)
Below, we compare summaries for January and February 2021 with January and February 2020. It turns out Kia is leading the race. An astonishing one in five new Kias registered in 2021 is fully electric.
| Make |
% of new registrations that have been fully electric (Jan & Feb 2021) |
|
|---|---|---|
| 1 | KIA | 20.4 |
| 2 | PEUGEOT | 18.3 |
| 3 | NISSAN | 10.9 |
| 4 | AUDI | 7.3 |
| 5 | VAUXHALL | 5.4 |
| 6 | MERCEDES-BENZ | 3.6 |
| 7 | BMW | 3.1 |
| 8 | VOLKSWAGEN | 1.4 |
| 9 | FORD | 0.0 |
| 10 | TOYOTA | 0.0 |
Will Kia hold the lead in March 2021? Check back next month for the first instalment of our new monthly UK car market bulletin.
Want to find out more about the data, or access and use it yourself? Or got a question you’d like us to ask of the data? We’re committed to making the data accessible to like-minded organisations. Get in touch on data@newautomotive.org.
