Electric Vehicles Account for 7 Percent of All Automobile Sales Worldwide - Study

More and more electric automobiles (both hybrid and all-electric) are being sold around the world, but trends in pricing for these vehicles vary enormously from continent to continent, which in turn has a direct impact on sales, points out a study published by automotive business intelligence consultant Jato. A new record for electric automobile sales will be set for 2019 with 4.89 million already sold between January and October, as opposed to 4.06 million for the same period in 2018. This year, around seven per cent of vehicles sold around the world are electric in one way or another. As for all-electrics, their sales rose to 1.204 million units worldwide between January and October, as opposed to 937,000 units over the same period a year earlier.

The most buoyant market for electric vehicles is in China, where they account for eight per cent of sales. For its part, Europe can lay claim to an average seven per cent of sales going to electrics, while America lags behind a little with an electric automobile market share of just four per cent. One major brake to more electric vehicles is their relatively high cost, and sales growth is certainly linked to trends in prices. In Europe and the United States, electric vehicle prices respectively increased by 42 per cent and 55 per cent between 2011 and 2019, whereas during the same period in China they actually fell by 50 per cent.

This is all the more paradoxical given that the only automaker which has electric vehicles accounting for 100 per cent of sales is Tesla. Ranked just behind the US manufacturer, China's Beijing and JAC, India's Mahindra and Japan's Suzuki and Toyota also chalk up more than 20 per cent of their sales with electric models. As to the kind of electric vehicles that are selling, city cars account for the biggest share of the electric vehicle market (35 per cent in 2019 as opposed to 42 per cent in 2018), but this may soon change given the growing popularity of electric SUVs (28 per cent market share as opposed to 25 per cent a year earlier).