Growth in the European car market continued in May. Last month, 935,950 cars were newly registered, 18.5 percent more than in May 2022, as the European manufacturers’ association Acea announced on Wednesday. This is the tenth consecutive month of sales growth. Especially the car markets in Italy, Germany and France picked up noticeably.
In the first five months of the year, new registrations were 4.4 million cars, 18 percent more than in the same period last year, as the association further announced. Last spring, however, new registrations were also very low due to the shortage of supply due to the lack of chips. In the period before the pandemic, from January to May 2019, 5.7 million new cars were registered.
The number of new registrations of electric cars increased disproportionately by around 71 percent to 129,847 units, their share of all new registrations climbed by almost four percentage points to 13.8 percent.
“Electrics are now booming again – but mainly thanks to state subsidies,” explained car expert Peter Fuss from the consulting firm EY. Markets with little or no support showed below-average market share for electric cars. The proportion of pure electric cars is 41 percent in Sweden and 2 percent in Croatia and Cyprus.