Passenger electric vehicle registrations in Europe by country 2023

Across the countries recorded in this statistic, Germany reported the largest plug-in electric vehicle sales, followed by France and the United Kingdom.

German electric vehicle market soars

Germany is the leading European market for plug-in electric car sales. Germany recorded some 699,900 new registrations of plug-in electric vehicles in the passenger car segment in 2023 with battery electric vehicle sales accounting for about 74.9 percent of this tally. The level of Germany's plug-in hybrid electric car sales was equally impressive at nearly 175,700 units, the highest value in this category in Europe's key electric vehicle markets. As of January 2024, around 1.4 million battery-electric vehicles were on the road in Germany.

Environmental framework

Europe represented 16 percent of the global transport sector's carbon dioxide emissions in 2022. That year, Germany was the European Union country with the largest transport sector CO₂ emissions. In order to curb the EU's transport emissions, the European Commission set a 2035 deadline to end sale of CO₂ emitting cars—especially fossil fuel vehicles—in 2022, though that deal has been challenged by various countries.