Electric and hybrid cars are catching up with petrol and diesel in the region
New vehicle registrations in Berlin and Brandenburg
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Electric and hybrid cars are catching up with petrol and diesel
Cars are bought less often during the pandemic years, and delivery bottlenecks are bad for business. A development cannot be stopped by this: There are more electric and hybrid cars on the streets of Berlin and Brandenburg than ever.
Almost half of the newly registered cars in Berlin in 2021 were electric and hybrid cars. According to statistics from the Federal Motor Transport Authority, it accounts for 48 percent of new registrations there, and 40 percent in Brandenburg. This means that the number of new electric and hybrid cars in Berlin has tripled compared to 2019, and in Brandenburg it has even quadrupled.
Fewer new registrations of cars with internal combustion engines
Overall, the pandemic has had a rather negative impact on the auto trade. In 2019 around 87,000 new cars were registered in Berlin and around 65,000 in Brandenburg.In 2021 there were only around 60,000 in Berlin and around 51,000 in Brandenburg.
The losers in this development are clearly the types of cars. In 2019, 88 percent of the newly registered cars in Berlin still had petrol or diesel in their tanks, while it was 91 percent in Brandenburg. In 2021, however, there were only 51 percent of newly registered cars in Berlin and 58 percent in Brandenburg.
The number of e-cars is increasing rapidly
The shares of electric and hybrid cars have risen sharply in both federal states – pandemic or not – in the last two years. Hybrid cars made up a large part of this, including cars that have both an internal combustion engine and an electric motor.
However, the number of new registrations for e-cars has increased significantly more than for hybrid cars. In Berlin, the number of registrations for e-cars has tripled in the last two years, and hybrids have more than doubled. In Brandenburg there were even more than seven times as many newly registered e-cars in 2021 as in 2019, and the number of registrations for hybrid cars has more than tripled.
Delivery bottlenecks partly responsible for the decline
One of the reasons for the decline in new registrations are delivery bottlenecks of electronic parts, which during the pandemic repeatedly caused the assembly lines in the automobile manufacturers to stand still. Last November, according to the Association of the Metal and Electrical Industry (VME), four out of five regional companies announced that they were suffering from supply and delivery bottlenecks and that they were expecting due to severe sales losses.
According to the Federal Motor Transport Authority, a total of 2.6 million cars were registered throughout Germany in 2021, 42 percent of which were electric or hybrid cars. By the way, the most frequently registered car was the small VW Up. It was registered 6,742 times, 5,343 times with an electric motor.