Spain is buying many electrified cars, but very few electric cars (and that is the important thing)

New month and we already have the registration data in Spain. Once again, breaking down the figures according to vehicle engines, they are good news for electrified cars, but not so much for pure electric ones. What’s going on?

The data. Striking and loud. Practically, four out of every ten cars that are bought in Spain are electrified. Specifically, last September, 30,456 cars were registered in Spain within the group of alternative vehicles, which also includes those powered by LPG and CNG.

The growth was 20.79% if we take the same period as last year as a reference. So far this year, 10.92% more electrified cars have been sold than in 2021. At this point, the market share of “alternative vehicles”, as they have been called since Anfac who publish the data, last year it was 28.31%. This year it is 34.90%, more than diesel cars and very close to gasoline (36.89% market share).

Electrified, non-electric. However, on these beads there is a mole. Electric vehicle sales grew by 21.09% in September compared to 2021. In the year to date, the growth of this technology has been 42.54%, with a total of 17,612 electric cars sold. Despite everything, the market share in September was 4.82% and so far this year it is 3.55%.

Plug-in hybrids don’t do too well either. Although they grew by 6.05% in September and by 16.27% so far this year, their market share is still 4.91% so far in 2022. In September it was 5.28%.

Hybrids? We also do not know to what extent the vehicles reflected as hybrids are such or are they vehicles that play with the ECO label and a 48-volt mild hybridization. These cars use an electrical support to circulate under sail or when starting but they only save a few tenths of fuel every 100 kilometers.

Anfac does not make a distinction between hybrids and micro-hybrids (neither does the DGT, which delivers the ECO label in both cases), so we do not really know what volume each of them occupies in the 21,026 units that were sold in September (26 .48% market share) or the 174,691 cars classified as “non-plug-in hybrids” so far in 2022, with a 24.69% impact.

stalled. With these data, the penetration of the electric car in Spain would double the data collected in 2021 and, however, it remains testimonial both if we compare ourselves with other countries in Europe and in the global of the entire continent.

The latest ACEA data They refer to the second quarter of the year. Until then (first semester), 14,338 pure electric cars had been sold in Spain. In the same period, 167,503 electric cars were sold in Germany, another 93,344 vehicles of this type in France and 29,609 pure electric cars if we talk about the Netherlands. In market share, that translated to 13.53% for Germany, 12.09% for France and 19.26% for the Netherlands. By then, the market share in Spain was 3.51%.

and there is interest. Despite the poor sales results, interest in the electric car is gradually increasing. According to car wow, the configurations of this type of car in its search engine have grown by 10% and during the last year they have surpassed the configurations of diesel cars. It must be taken into account that, in 2021, the interest in the electric car was barely 1%.

However, potential customers continue to show a general rejection of this technology. 62% of those surveyed do not contemplate the purchase of an electric or plug-in hybrid car in the short term, the main drawbacks being the scarcity of charging points (24.5%), the lack of information (23.5%), their high price compared to combustion models (19.7%) and their limited autonomy (18.5%).