Juan Cole Informed Comment
Gasoline car sales in Europe have plummeted to only about a fifth of new car registrations in Europe in the first 8 months of 2026, down from 28% in the same period last year.
At the same time, battery-electric (21.7%) and plug-in hybrid (10%) EVs came to 31.7% of new car sales January-August, nearly a third.
So this is worth repeating. In the 27 countries of the European Union, nearly a third of new cars sold so far this year have a plug-in battery. And only about a fifth run on gasoline. (Another 7% run on diesel, down from 9% last year).
EVs are outselling gasoline cars, and even outselling both gasoline and diesel cars put together. And gasoline car sales are down this year nearly 8%.
Some 452 million people live in the European Union, and they are some of the richest and most technologically advanced people in the world. They are voting with their feet for electrification.
Sales of battery-electric vehicles are up a remarkable 15.8% year over year. Sales of plug-in hybrids are up 8%.—–
Hybrid-electric cars don’t have a plug-in battery but rather a small battery charged by an internal electric motor that runs on a gasoline engine and on brake action. They typically get twice the fuel mileage that pure gasoline cars get. The Toyota Prius is an example. These are currently Europe’s favorite type of car, at 36.6% of market share.
The trend lines show that cars that run entirely on gasoline and diesel are becoming less popular every year, and are rapidly being replaced by EVs, with pure battery electric cars preferred over plug-in hybrids (unlike in the United States).
As for Germany, the most populous state in the EU, Benjamin Wehrmann at Clean Energy Wire reports that
“High prices for fossil fuels caused by the US- and Israeli-led war on Iran have pushed more customers to opt for battery-powered cars in recent months. A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a key waterway for international fossil fuel trading, led to rapid price increases at the pump, prompting the government to spend more than 1.5 billion euros on a short-lived tax cut on petrol and diesel, in force from May to June. The government recently agreed to re-introduce the tax breaks until the end of the year.”
This point is worth underlining. The Netanyahu-Trump war on Iran not only increased gasoline and diesel prices, because of the partial obstruction of the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb, but it also impelled some European governments to offer purchase premiums for buying an EV.
Wehrmann adds of Germany, “One in four newly registered cars was an EV in the first eight months of 2026, with the share climbing to about one third in August and up from about a fifth in 2025, DIW [the German Institute for Economic Research] said.”
So in Germany EVs climbed from 20% of new car registrations in 2025 to about 33% in August.
Photo by Eren Goldman on Unsplash
About 5% of the cars on Germany’s roads now are EVs, some 2.5 million vehicles. In China, more like 10% of passenger vehicles are EVs.
Germany is also rapidly building out its automobile charging capacity, Wehrmann says: “Germany’s grid regulator BNetzA said there were roughly 118,000 charging stations across Germany as of August this year, an increase of 16 percent compared to one year before. At the same time, the charging capacity of all stations increased 26 percent.”
Charging stations are up 16% year over year! That increase is a powerful predictor of further EV sales — the more charging stations there are, the less range anxiety consumers feel.
Electricity demand at charging stations is up 66% this year over last.
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