Earlier this year, Germany announced its first electric vehicle incentive program to spur adoption of green vehicles in the country. Financed by both the state and the local auto industry, the program offers a €4,000 discount at the purchase of an all-electric vehicle and €3,000 for a plug-in hybrid.
The program is capped to electric vehicles with a starting price of less than €60,000, which prompt Tesla to respond and claim that it was purposely left out by the auto industry since its vehicles start at over €60,000. While the program is not helping Tesla, it is certainly helping BMW as reports are coming out claiming that sales of the BMW i3 are somewhat unsurprisingly significantly rising in Germany since the launch of the program earlier this month.
German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS) is citing sources inside BMW via Reuters:
“Citing company sources, FAS said that orders for the new i3 with a longer range battery, for deliveries from mid-July onwards, had risen “many times over” levels following the introduction of the car’s initial version in 2013.
Total orders for the new version had risen to 5,000 worldwide of which around 1,000 were placed in Germany, ahead of delivery.”
With the debut of the 2017 BMW i3, the German automaker introduced a new and bigger 33 kWh battery pack to its only all-electric vehicle. It enables up to 114 miles of range on a single charge.
Germany is an important auto market in Europe, but electric vehicle sales have only represented a small percentage of the market so far – ~0.5% market share. It will be interesting to follow the impact of the incentive during the second half of the year.
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