Growth in electric vehicle sales is flagging

Global e-car market growing more slowly Keystone-SDA

Despite selling more than ten million purely battery-powered vehicles worldwide last year, growth in the e-car market is slowing - including in Switzerland.

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According to an analysis by the German news agency DPA, there were 10.4 million sales in the 21 markets examined by management consultants PwC. This represents an increase of 14.3% on 2023.

But PwC’s initial calculation of 28% growth in 2023 has been revised downwards. The main reason for this is that PwC has corrected its data collection method for China in order to prevent vehicles exported from there from being counted twice. The difference is in the hundreds of thousands.

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Declines in Switzerland too

China is the dominant market in absolute terms, accounting for almost two thirds of the volume – specifically 6.7 million pure electric vehicles (BEVs). It is also well above average in terms of growth at a good 20% – based on the corrected figures from the previous year.

It is followed by the United States with 1.2 million vehicles sold – an increase of 7.4%. Unlike in the past, third place did not go to Germany, but to Britain with 382,000 BEVs. This was a good 21% more than in the previous year.

Germany, on the other hand, fell just short of fourth place because the local electric car market slumped by a good 27% to 381,000 cars last year following the abolition of purchase incentives.

In other European markets such as Switzerland, France, Austria, Italy and Sweden, the number of electric cars also fell, although the declines there were less severe than in Germany.

External factors play a major role

“It is currently clear that the global e-car market continues to be heavily dependent on external factors,” says Jörn Neuhausen from Strategy&, a consultancy belonging to PwC. The strong sales in China at the end of the year can also be explained by “a kind of scrappage scheme for the purchase of e-cars”.

Growth in plug-in hybrids was significantly stronger in 2024 than in purely electric cars. The number of plug-in hybrids increased by 56% to 6.2 million in the markets surveyed. For hybrids without plugs, growth was 18% to 8.9 million.

Translated from German by DeepL/mga

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