Europe electric car sales are in for the month of June from Jose Pontes*. It’s a really interesting market. More interesting than North America, China, or any other, imho. Individual country markets in Europe are getting stronger, but they are very different from one another, so the broader continental charts can vary a lot.
In the month of June, the top three models were reportedly the Renault Zoe (#1), Tesla Model S (#2), and the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV (#3). The Volkswagen Golf GTE was close behind in #4, though, and the Nissan LEAF was within fighting distance at #5. After that registrations tailed off a bit, but there was a next tier of three cars well above the rest: Audi A3 e-Tron (#6), Volkswagen e-Golf (#7), and BMW i3 (#8).
For the year to date, the chart changes a bit (play with it below). #1 is the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, #2 is the Nissan LEAF, and #3 is the Renault Zoe right behind it. The Tesla Model S falls to #4 and the Volkswagen Golf GTE to #5. The Volkswagen e-Golf rises to #6 and the BMW i3 rises to #7. The Audi A3 e-Tron drops to #8 but is still a healthy distance above the rest.
It’s an interesting mix of plug-in hybrids and 100% electric cars. Overall, though 100% electrics are leading the charge (no pun intended). See the table on the bottom. Congrats to the 7 (or 5 if you combine VW with Audi and Renault with Nissan) companies at the top of the list. Have a look at the charts yourself:
*The registration numbers come from José Pontes, who does a tremendous job pulling together figures from a large variety of official and unofficial sources. However, I used to try this myself, and I can tell you this: you basically can’t find complete registration numbers for any country. So, Jose has to “estimate” for certain types of vehicles and certain models in each of the countries. Then there are some countries where he isn’t able to collect the data at all. Nonetheless, pulling together as many numbers as he can for several European countries, including the ones with the biggest electric car markets, gives us a big-picture view of the European electric car market.