New registrations of electric cars in Germany are currently increasing significantly. According to current figures from the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA), new registrations of vehicles with alternative drives increased by 15.2 percent after the first six months of the current year. Although the plug-in hybrids, which were initially in such high demand, are now seeing declining registration numbers, battery-powered vehicles (BEVs) are doing all the better. They recently achieved an increase of 31.7 percent compared to the same period last year.
According to forecasts by the market research company Dataforce, the strong increase in the number of registrations of electric cars will experience a reversal from September: With the end of the state environmental bonus for fleet cars from September, the numbers would turn negative, writes the “Automobilwoche”.
“We assume that the BEV growth in fleets will shrink from 63 percent in the first half of the year to just two percent in the second half of the year,” the trade journal quoted Dataforce analyst Benjamin Kibies as saying. He expects a slump of over 50 percent in September and December. Because in the first half of 2023, two thirds of the newly registered e-vehicles had commercial registrations. Does this also affect the federal government’s goal of bringing at least 15 million electric cars onto the roads by 2030? “The federal government’s 15 million target is a long way off,” Kibies summed up in an interview with “Automobilwoche”.
There are many reasons for the expected decline. When asked by stern, Kibies said: “There is still a lack of affordable e-models for the mass market, so that electric cars are limited to the premium sector. According to our calculations, the reduction in subsidies means that BEVs are often no longer financially profitable. The relatively high electricity and cheap fuel prices compared to other European countries are also an important factor here.” As a result, models with combustion engines are likely to be an alternative to electric vehicles again, although the EU intends to introduce a sales ban for new vehicles from 2035.
In the long term, after the expected fall, new registrations of electric cars should pick up again from next autumn. According to dataforce forecasts, the proportion of all-electric cars will increase to 29 percent by 2025 and 45 percent by 2028. “The large number of new models is an important factor because newer cars are always more interesting for buyers and prices are falling due to increasing competition,” says Kibies of the star. After all, many manufacturers have invested billions in the development of electric vehicles and have now geared their production to electromobility. New combustion models would “become a rarity,” according to a Dataforce publication at the end of June.
