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Volkswagen production in Zwickau
Photo: RONNY HARTMANN / AFP
A good 2.62 million cars hit German roads last year.
That was ten percent less than in the already weak year 2020, as current data from the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) show.
In the pre-crisis year 2019, around 3.6 million new cars were registered in Germany.
New registrations were last lower before reunification.
In 1985, 2.4 million new cars hit the streets of West Germany.
"Instead of a recovery after the onset of the corona crisis, new registrations continued to decline," said Reinhard Zirpel, President of the Association of International Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (VDIK).
The main reason for the sustained decline was delivery bottlenecks, especially for electronic components such as semiconductors.
“Customers wanted to accelerate and buy more cars.
But the manufacturers were only partially able to deliver because of the production bottlenecks, ”said Zirpel.
However, the decline could hardly affect the boom in electric cars. According to KBA, almost 356,000 of the 2.62 million new vehicles were fully electric. That was around 83 percent more than in 2020 and corresponds to a share of new vehicle registrations of around 13.6 percent. According to KBA, hybrid drives had a share of almost 29 percent. Their new registrations increased by 43 percent to almost 754,600.
From the point of view of environmentalists, however, the high demand for battery vehicles and the lower number of new cars in the past year are only partially good news for the climate.
"Nobody should confuse the reduced number of new registrations due to the lack of chips and economic uncertainties with a success of the mobility transition," said Greenpeace traffic expert Tobias Austrup.
"Although the number of e-cars is growing significantly, saying goodbye to the climate-damaging combustion engine is still not going fast enough."
More than every fourth new car is an SUV
In addition, the share of SUVs in all new registrations also increased significantly in the past year.
According to KBA, more than every fourth new car was an SUV last year.
In order to further stimulate the demand for electric cars, the new federal government wants to concentrate more on promoting e-vehicles and expanding the charging infrastructure. However, the Federal Environment Agency (UBA) also warns against viewing all-electric cars as a panacea. "A sustainable transport turnaround will only succeed if the focus is also placed on avoidance and relocation," said an earlier study by the UBA on the environmental friendliness of electric cars. "That also corresponds to the image of a liveable city with attractive local public transport, more bicycle and foot traffic and short distances between work, living and supply."
Meanwhile, the VDIK assumes that the car market will recover in the year that has just started.
At the beginning of December, the association expected around three million new cars for the year 2022, an increase of 15 percent compared to the previous year.
The prerequisite, however, is that the delivery bottlenecks normalize and the very high order backlogs at the manufacturers can be processed.
The consulting firm EY thinks this is unlikely.
»The shortage of chips will also cause considerable production losses in 2022;
the hoped-for market recovery is becoming more and more distant, "said EY on the basis of its own analysis.
hej / dpa