For the first time, battery electric vehicles were the most popular powertrain in Germany in June, setting a new sales record as the birthplace of the automobile moves forward into the next stage of its evolution.
EV sales have been spiking lately, adding to their continual rise since the inception of the modern EV industry. Growth has been especially significant this year as countries respond to a stupid oil war and realize that perhaps it’s finally time to get off this resource that we’ve always known we should get off it.
Right now, the part of the world that’s seeing the largest rise in EV sales is Europe. And within Europe, its largest car market, Germany, is finally seeing the light.
Germany actually lagged slightly in the early days of EV sales. It wasn’t until 2019 that Germans bought more EVs than Norwegians – despite being 16 times the size of tiny Norway.
Since then, EVs have been up and down in Germany, but mostly up. An incentive was cancelled in 2023, leading sales to drop, but they’ve recovered since then, and are now reaching new heights.
The newest height was reached in the month we have the most recent sales data for, June, where battery electric cars have reached an important milestone – they were the most popular powertrain for the first time, according to ADAC, Germany’s largest auto club.
In June, BEVs barely outsold conventional hybrids, with 84,057 sales to hybrids’ 83,315. BEVs had trailed behind both hybrids and gasoline sales as recently as the end of last year.
Gasoline cars sold 60,796 units in June, diesel 33,862, and plug-in hybrids 32,212.
(ADAC put together a nice infographic showing sales over time for each powertrain)
That puts BEVs alone at a 28.4% market share, the largest of any powertrain. Plug in hybrids are an additional 10.9%, putting the plug-in total at a respectable 39.3%.
This means that a majority of vehicle sales in Germany are still fossil-fueled, so there’s much work still to be done. BEVs outsold each other powertrain, but didn’t outsell all other powertrains. The spike in BEV sales reduced the average CO2 emissions of new cars in Germany by 13.6% year over year, which is a nice reduction, but we need a pace like that globally across all industries if we’re going to avoid the worst effects of climate change.
In terms of the total installed base, there’s still a lot of ground left to gain, with BEVs + PHEVs hovering at around 6% of cars on Germany’s roads. This is only the first month where BEVs have sold more than each other powertrain, but cars stay on the road for years.
For an analogue, Norway had already basically eliminated non-EV sales by 2021, but it wasn’t until 2026 that EVs outnumbered diesel cars on its roads. And it won’t be for another decade or so that polluting vehicles will be basically eliminated from the country’s roads.
So there are a lot of polluting vehicles that will be running on German roads for some time to come – and a majority of cars sold today in Germany still do spew poison out of their tailpipes. And with Europe weakening EV targets even as oil shocks show the world what a bad idea it is to keep using it to fuel vehicles, the life of the internal combustion engine will be extended just a little longer, and the lives of everything on Earth will be harmed more.
But last month’s milestone is still notable, as Germany is the place that the internal combustion automobile was born. And now, battery electric vehicles are, at least for the month of June, the new champion for the first time.
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