Sales of fully electric cars in Europe’s main auto markets jumped by almost a third in the first quarter of 2026, as drivers looked for alternatives to combustion engines after the war in Iran caused the highest spike in petrol prices in years.<\/p>\n
New battery-electric vehicle (BEV) registrations, a proxy for sales, rose 29.4% from a year ago to almost 560,000 in the quarter and were up 51.3% at over 240,000 in March alone in 15 European markets, data collected by trade association E-Mobility Europe and research firm New Automotive showed today.<\/p>\n
Last year, those markets accounted for 94% of all BEV sales in the European Union and the European Free Trade Association, whose countries align with EU laws regulating CO2 emissions, data by the ACEA auto lobby shows.<\/p>\n
“March’s surge in electric car sales is one of Europe’s biggest recent gains in energy security, in a month when oil dependence has become a real vulnerability,” E-Mobility Europe Secretary General Chris Heron said in a statement.<\/p>\n
The joint statement from the two organisations said the half-million BEVs registered in the quarter were enough to reduce oil consumption by 2 million barrels per year.<\/p>\n
The region’s five largest EV markets – Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Poland – have recorded growth of more than 40% in BEV sales so far this year, it said. It estimated that 21.2% of all new cars registered in the EU and EFTA in March were electric.<\/p>\n
In a separate report published earlier in April, New Automotive said BEV registrations in Britain, Europe’s second-biggest BEV market after Germany, grew 12.8% in the quarter, also helped by rising petrol prices, and accounted for 22.5% of new car sales in the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sales of fully electric cars in Europe’s main auto markets jumped by almost a third in the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":408468,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[72,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-408467","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408467"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408467\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}