Of the 169,754 newly registered cars in January 2021, 62,371 cars, and thus 36.7 percent, had alternative drives, counted by the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA). More than a third of all new cars registered in January are therefore purely battery-electric, with plug-in or normal hybrid, and have a fuel cell, hydrogen or gas tanks on board. However, the absolute number of new registrations fell significantly across all drive types in January. The second nationwide Corona lockdown met the car dealers again: at the beginning of the year they were only able to hand over vehicles that had long been ordered to customers; new business was hardly possible because car dealerships were closed.
The share of alternative drives in the overall new car market has more than doubled compared to January 2020, when their number was 15.9 percent. Astonishingly: Exactly 36,911 newly registered cars in January use electric motors as an important drive source – that is, they run purely battery-electric, as a plug-in hybrid or electricity generated by means of a hydrogen fuel cell. According to KBA, these electric drives achieved a share of new registrations of 21.7 percent, which is more than three times as much as in January of the previous year.
The proportion of new cars with alternative drives differs greatly according to the brands. At Audi, 71.2 percent of all new registrations were equipped with an alternative drive. at BMW it was more than every second new car (57.4 percent), at Mercedes it was 40.3 percent. ford came to 35.0 percent in January. Every fourth new car from the brand Porsche was approved with an alternative drive. At VW (22.7 percent) and Mini (22.6 percent) it was every fifth.
In the group of plug-in and battery-electric drives, Mercedes (28.3 percent) and BMW (28.0 percent) achieved the largest share of new registrations with electric drives within their fleet. All other German brands had shares of more than 20 percent, only Ford (12.9 percent) and Opel (10.2 percent) were lower.
In the area of purely battery-powered Electric cars reached the brands VW, Smart, Renault and Hyundai each had the highest number of new registrations. At VW there were 4,562 brand-new, all-electric cars, which corresponded to a share of 13.3 percent of the VW registrations. Renault came up with 1,344 new vehicle documents for pure electric cars in January, their share in Renault new registrations was 16.4 percent. At Hyundai, almost a third of the new registrations were purely electric drives, most recently exactly 1,281 Hyundai electric vehicles were newly registered.
Smart, Tesla and Polestar each achieved shares of 100 percent for electric drives within their brands – no wonder: These three brands only sell vehicles with purely battery-electric drives.