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VW's ID.4 will have 33,000 new registrations in Western Europe in the first eight months of 2021
Photo: Matthias Rietschel / REUTERS
The global shortage of semiconductors is still affecting the automotive industry heavily. Again and again, the manufacturers have to shut down factories for a while because important parts are missing. With one type of drive, however, the industry is still concentrating on producing as many vehicles as possible: The boom in registrations for all-electric cars is still not ebbing in Europe. This is shown by a new evaluation for Western Europe for the first eight months of 2021.
From January to August almost 644,000 pure electric cars and 681,000 plug-in hybrids were sold in 18 Western European countries. This is shown by a market study by the e-car data specialist Schmidt Automotive Research, which manager magazin has available. This means that the number of new registrations for e-vehicles has more than doubled compared to the same period in the previous year. And the largest Western European car market is also the clear leader in terms of the number of registrations: in Germany, over 200,000 vehicle registration documents for pure e-cars were issued by August, and there were even a few thousand more for plug-in hybrids. The second largest European market for all-electric cars is currently Great Britain, with France in second place for plug-in hybrids:
The detailed evaluation based on the most approved pure e-models also shows that Volkswagen is getting closer to its goal of market leadership in e-cars, at least in Western Europe.
Tesla's Model 3 was by far the best-selling e-car in Western Europe recently.
The Americans sold almost 75,000 of their electric sedans in the first eight months, a good two-thirds more than in the same period last year.
VW's electric car attacker ID.3 comes in second with 44,000 units in the ranking of individual models.
However, since the end of 2020, VW has also had the ID.4 offspring of the SUV in the race, which recently had around 33,000 new registrations in Western Europe.
Taken together, both ID models have 76,415 new registrations and are recently just ahead of Tesla's Model 3.
In the duel between Tesla and VW for e-car sales in Western Europe, the Wolfsburg-based company is now just ahead of the game.
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