Will it really work with the 15 million electric cars that the federal government plans to drive on German roads by 2030? It doesn’t look like it at the moment. This is not only because the Germans are buying too few battery vehicles. Another reason is that tens of thousands of cars are newly registered in Germany – but after a short time they no longer appear in the German car stock. Why is that so?
Car analyst Matthias Schmidt used data from the Federal Motor Transport Authority to calculate the size of the German e-car gap. The authority has therefore registered around 480,000 new electric cars in Germany in the past twelve months. But over the same period, the number of e-cars in the fleet has only increased by around 390,000. What happened to the missing 90,000 vehicles? Schmidt also explains it by the fact that the manufacturer registers test vehicles and deregisters them again after the test phase. They would then be dismantled or even scrapped. But the proportion is likely to be small – even if you take this into account, around one in five registered e-cars is no longer on German roads.
Schmidt has been evaluating the numbers since 2012, when electromobility in Germany was starting to take off very slowly. According to this, there have been around 211,000 fewer electric cars in Germany than have been registered in Germany since then. Where have they all gone?
The explanation is probably quite simple: no other country in Europe has such high subsidies for e-cars as Germany. By the end of 2022, there was an environmental bonus of up to 9,000 euros if someone newly registered a vehicle with an electric drive. In addition, there was a very short minimum holding period: the car only had to be registered with a keeper for six months in order to receive the subsidy. After that, the owner could simply resell the car. This period was only extended to twelve months in January 2023. Since the subsidies were also reduced at the beginning of the year, this should slow down the big e-car exodus.
E-cars from Germany are cheaper abroad than domestic cars
Otherwise, it has probably worked as follows for tens of thousands of electric cars: They were bought and registered in Germany, after which the owner collected the environmental bonus. And after six months, the car was then sold abroad – usually even at a profit, because in countries without high subsidies, the young used cars from Germany were still significantly cheaper than local cars.
German e-cars were probably sold particularly often to Scandinavia. Not only is the demand for electric vehicles particularly high there, but so is the price. Because unlike in Germany, e-cars were not subsidized in Norway, for example, but made combustion engines more expensive due to high registration costs. Auto analyst Schmidt can also support this thesis with numbers: In Denmark, there were around 30,000 more electric cars in the past twelve months than were registered as new cars there in the same period. It is obvious that a large proportion of the additional battery vehicles were imported from Germany as young used vehicles.
The greatest decline in e-cars in the past twelve months was at Tesla: only around every fourth Tesla subsidized by environmental bonuses in Germany is still on German roads, but Mercedes and VW also sold around 10,000 cars abroad. One could, of course, take the view that the generous German subsidy was taken advantage of by some clever car salesmen. From an environmental point of view, however, it is probably irrelevant in which country the electric car ultimately drives around.