It is official: the number of purely electrically powered passenger cars in Germany has exceeded the one million mark. After a weak January, the electric vehicle market share thus rose again to 15.7 per cent. However, new registrations of plug-in hybrids declined.

This is according to the official figures now published by the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA). According to KBA, there were 1,013,009 electric cars registered in Germany on 1 January 2023. That is a 63.8 per cent increase compared to the previous year. With a total stock of around 48.8 million passenger cars, EVs thus account for about two per cent.

Even though the one-million mark was barely cracked at the turn of the year, it was not a surprise. After all, for 1 October 2022, the KBA counted 840,645 electric cars in Germany. If one adds the monthly (and publically available) BEV registrations for October, November and December, the result would have been 1,038,731 electric cars. In other words, unless more than 38,731 EVs were deregistered in the final quarter (which was unlikely), it was to be expected that the million mark would be cracked.

Now that there are exact figures available from the KBA, it seems that 25,722 electric cars were deregistered in Q4 2022 – be it after an accident (write-off), temporary decommissioning or sale abroad.

On 1 January 2022, 618,460 electric cars were registered in Germany, which was already a 100 per cent increase compared to the beginning of 2021, when it was only 309,083 electric cars.