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Volkswagen electric car: demand falling
Photo: Andreas Arnold/ dpa
Sales of electric cars have fallen significantly compared to the previous year.
While more than 100,000 purely electric vehicles were registered in December 2022, only around 18,100 new ones came onto the roads in January.
This was announced by the Federal Motor Transport Authority.
The numbers also went down for plug-in hybrids – from almost 70,000 to less than 9,000.
The reason for the decline is likely to be the reduced subsidy premiums.
Plug-in hybrids, which use a combustion engine in addition to an electric motor, have not been subsidized at all since the beginning of the year.
The subsidy premiums for battery and fuel cell cars have fallen.
4500 euros for cheaper Stromer
Buyers of fully electric cars can now receive a maximum of 4,500 euros from the state instead of 6,000 euros if their car is on the sales list for less than 40,000 euros net.
For more expensive vehicles up to a net list price of 65,000 euros, there are still 3,000 euros instead of the previous 5,000 euros.
In the coming year, the subsidy premiums will continue to decrease.
Even with combustion engines, fewer cars were registered at the beginning of the year than in January 2022. Here, however, the numbers only fell by 2.6 percent to just over 179,000 cars.
Above all, the number of private registrations has collapsed, falling by around 12 percent.
Most new cars this year were again SUVs - more than every fourth car fell into this category.
rai/dpa