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This article was published on January 7, 2021

Germans say ‘ja ja ja’ to EVs in 2020

Germany bought three times as many EVs in 2020 compared to a year earlier


Germans say ‘ja ja ja’ to EVs in 2020

It’s not just the Dutch and Norwegians that went wild for electric vehicles (EVs) last year. Germany also had a bumper year for sales of battery powered vehicles in the country.

According to Germany’s road traffic regulator, more than 194,000 BEVs were sold in 2020 in the country, Reuters reports. Three times as many as 2019.

Richard Damm the president of the regulator, the KBA, said the country is on its way toward having more than 7 million EVs on German roads by 2030.

[Read: Meet the 4 scale-ups using data to save the planet]

It might be on its way to that goal, but the reality is it has a lot further to go.

By the end of 2020, BEV registrations represented just 1.2% of all passenger car registrations. A year earlier that figure was 0.5%.

Germany was just one of 18 countries in Western Europe that experienced a bumper year of EV sales.

In December, 68.9% of all new cars registered in the Netherlands were electric.

Across the entire year, 54.3% of all new passenger vehicles registered in Norway were electric, making it the first country in the world where EV sales outweigh combustion engine cars for a whole calendar year.


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