Summary
- Volkswagen beat Tesla in European EV sales across the first three months of 2025, data shows.
- Registrations for VW EVs are up more than 150%, while Tesla lost huge ground.
- However, the Model Y and Model 3 remain Europe’s top two most-registered EVs.
Tesla had a HUGE lead when they started to sell the model S in 2012, and many places there were significant tax incentives to buy one. Back then every competitor to Tesla had really poor range, and they were generally very small city cars. The Tesla model S was a giant leap forward for electric cars (BEV).
The hybrids were never very popular, it was basically a misstep by traditional makers, probably an attempt to leverage their know how on making ICE cars, and use that to make a “semi electric”. The popularity they achieved was probably mostly because many places they enjoyed similar tax incentives to “real” electric cars (BEV).
Now many brands have caught up with Tesla and a popular in Europe, like Hyundai/KIA, VW group, BMW, Mercedes, Stelantis, Renault, Volvo, Polestar, and even Chinese cars like BYD, Xpeng and MG.
So there is lots of competition today, but IMO the first good alternative for a reasonable price here was the Hyundai Kona. I think it’s only about 5 years ago the other makers began to catch up to Tesla.
And now they are beginning to surpass Tesla in different ways. This was made easier by Tesla because they have failed to develop to improve their cars. Tesla model Y is 5 years old now, and they only came out with a facelift version this year!
For comparison European makers have a development cycle of 3 years, and China is extremely fast with 1-2 years!
I found your post interesting found another community from you.
Just wondered if you ever post on [email protected] with batteries being so integral to cars and energy seems like a good overlap and would like to see more in depth comments on energy.
Thanks, but it looks like some sort of mail list, I don’t use that.
Thats weird.
Turns out I have no idea how to link to communities. Maybe if I link to a post in that community you can see what I mean.
I’m on lemm.ee so I guess thats why that link comes up. But when I click on the community the previous link I sent is written at the top.
https://lemm.ee/post/62031137
Thanks, I’ve had problems with that too. But I found it now searching communities, and have subscribed. 😀
See, again what I’m missing from that statement is location.
Tesla had a lead where? You couldn’t buy a Tesla at all where I lived at the time. Visiting North America everybody wanted one and I knew multiple people who did have one, but there were even more European EVs there than in Europe. First BMW i series I saw was in Canada. Last one, too.
So when did all of this reach Europe? Where in Europe? How fast did it grow in some parts versus others? Was it inconsistently fast but Tesla was ahead everywhere consistently or was the Tesla growth desynched from EV growth in general?
People are feeding me very reductive one-size-fits-all views of the EV market as a global thing in this thread while also giving me very good reason to suspect the EV market isn’t globally uniform (or even uniform across Europe, for that matter) at the same time, and no resources to tell which is which beyond anecdotal observation.
This thread is about EU!
Mostly my perspective on the technology side is global, but this is general for Europe, but where developments start from the north and the south and east are a bit behind, I’m located in Denmark.
There are American brands I don’t mention, because they are specific to USA only like Rivian and Lucid. There are also Japanese brands I don’t mention because although Nissan started early, they have failed a lot, and is only now catching up, Toyota and Honda has been very slow too, but have new models out this year that are good.
The Tesla (technological) lead in 2012 with the model S was global. Obviously the lead in sales was only for the countries where it was sold. Like USA, Canada, Scandinavia as the earliest markets. I think it was first in 2018 Tesla started in China.
There are still places like India where you can’t buy a Tesla.
But as I stated above, the center of all of this is the OP post that is about EV sales in EU.
Here’s a chart with the EV sales by country in EU:
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/new-registrations-of-electric-vehicles
If you are in Norway you are 20 times as likely to see an EV compared to if you are in Poland.
Obviously it isn’t, an EV is expensive, and it requires electric grid infrastructure to use. Also tax incentives are very different.
We can’t tell you how things are compared to where you are, when you don’t tell us.
Finally data! Fig 2 in your link tells the entire story, I believe.
For the record, my point is about the EU. The idea I’m trying to impress is that respondents to this thread seem to look at EV positioning and penetration globally, but if you’re just looking at the EU that will be very different than North America, and the perspective people keep repeating seems very, very, VERY North American to me.
No wonder that’s the case, because yeah, the differences are huge, as you say. Not just for overall penetration, raging from 90% to 5% of all cars registered in your chart. Also in the types of EVs. Plug-in hybrid goes from 10-ish percent of new EVs in Norway to 75%-ish of all EVs in Romania. That’s a big swing (and some egg on grumpy "plug-in-hybrids-are-no-longer-a-concern guy up the thread).
The spread is also… consistently inconsistent? Northern countries seem to definitely take the lead, but the rest is strange. Why is Portugal so much higher than Spain? Why is Romania plug-in hybrid heaven? Why is there such a sudden break of almost 10 % between the top and the bottom half of the table?
And that’s even before we try to break it down by brand. I bet the Tesla dominance thing is also weirdly spread. Would love to know if there is a correlation with how those two numbers shake out one way or the other.
In any case, thanks for looking that up and being, astonishingly, the first person to actually check their assumptions in this whole thread.