By November 2025, year-to-date (YTD) new car registrations across the European Union rose by 1.4% compared with the same period last year. While this signals a modest recovery, total volumes remain significantly below pre-pandemic levels, highlighting the ongoing challenges facing the automotive market.
Electrification continues to reshape buyer preferences. Battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) reached a 16.9% market share YTD, broadly in line with expectations for the year. Although encouraging, this figure still leaves room for growth if the EU is to stay on course with its long-term transition goals. Hybrid-electric vehicles (HEVs) remain the most popular powertrain choice, while plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) are steadily gaining traction.
EU electric vehicle adoption continues to accelerate, with November registrations jumping over 44% year-over-year to 188,730 units, accounting for 21.3% of the market. This contributed to a year-to-date total of 1.66 million registrations (January–November 2025), securing a 16.9% share of the overall automotive market. The four largest EU markets—Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France—together representing 62% of all BEV registrations, all recorded strong growth. Germany led the surge with a 41.3% increase, followed by Belgium (+10.2%), France (+9.1%), and the Netherlands (+8.8%).
Hybrid-electric car registrations also saw robust growth, reaching 3,408,907 units during the same period. This expansion was driven primarily by strong performances in Spain (+26%), France (+24.2%), Germany (+8.7%), and Italy (+7.9%). As a result, hybrid-electric vehicles now make up 34.6% of total EU car registrations.
Plug-in hybrid registrations continued their upward trend, totaling 912,723 units from January to November 2025. Significant gains in key markets—Spain (+113%), Italy (+80.6%), and Germany (+62.7%)—pushed the PHEV market share to 9.3%, up from 7.1% a year earlier.
Looking specifically at November 2025, year-over-year figures highlight the momentum behind electrified vehicles. Battery-electric car registrations surged by 44.1%, while hybrid-electric models increased by 4.2%. Plug-in hybrids also posted a strong rise of 38.4%.
In contrast, traditional internal combustion engine vehicles continued to lose ground. By the end of November 2025, petrol car registrations had fallen by 18.6%, with declines across all major EU markets. France recorded the sharpest drop (-32.1%), followed by Germany (-22.4%), Italy (-17.4%), and Spain (-14.6%).
With 2,665,739 petrol cars registered so far this year, the petrol market share has dropped to 27%, down from 33.7% during the same period last year. Diesel registrations fared even worse, declining by 24.4% and shrinking to a 9% market share YTD. November’s year-over-year figures further underline this trend, with petrol registrations down 21.9% and diesel down 23.2%.
Blagojce Krivevski is physicist and green technology lover. Keep in touch with Blagojce through his email, web site, Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and Google+.
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