Vehicles: electric cars, vans, lorries and buses on the road

New registrations and the fleet are two different questions

The lead chart answers how quickly the vehicles being bought are changing. Its share is the proportion of newly registered vehicles in a year that are zero-emission, meaning battery-electric or hydrogen fuel cell. The fleet chart answers something slower: how many of the vehicles on the road today are electric. A share of new registrations near a quarter still leaves a fleet in the low single digits, because a car bought this year joins around fifteen years of cars bought before it. Anyone comparing a registration share with a fleet share is comparing a flow with a stock.

Four vehicle types are kept apart, because they electrify at different speeds and for different reasons. City buses run fixed routes from a depot, which suits a battery and a single charger, and public operators buy them under procurement rules that favour clean vehicles. Vans and lorries are bought on running cost over a long working life, and the charging they need along motorways is only now being built. Cars sit between the two.

The sources are Eurostat and the Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt, Germany's federal vehicle authority, which keeps the national register. They count on slightly different terms: the authority publishes German registrations by month and by powertrain, while Eurostat harmonises national returns so member states can be set beside each other. Where the two disagree on the same quantity and no published note explains why, the figure is left blank and the sources panel says so.

Every figure is marked measured or estimated, and a share calculated here from two counts is marked as such. Registrations show where vehicles were put on the road. Where they were built is not published on comparable terms for Europe.