New registrations of electric cars are stagnating, but they are continuing to rise on the used car market – albeit at a lower level.
The market for used electric cars is still small, but is growing strongly. In the first half of the year, pure electric vehicles accounted for 2.19 percent of ownership transfers nationwide, according to an analysis of figures from the Federal Motor Transport Authority by the dpa. A year ago, it was only 1.25 percent. The shares are even higher in Bavaria at 2.62 percent, Hamburg at 2.5 percent and Baden-Württemberg at 2.44 percent. The lowest values are in Saxony-Anhalt at 1.18 percent and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania at 1.28 percent.
Despite the significant increase, electric vehicles still play a much smaller role in the used market than in new registrations. In the latter case, the electric share was much higher in the first half of the year at 12.5 percent. And the order of the states with the largest shares is also somewhat different, with Baden-Württemberg leading the way with 15.6 percent of new registrations being electric, ahead of Schleswig-Holstein (15.0) and Berlin (14.7 percent). Bavaria is only in fifth place with 13.1 percent. Saxony-Anhalt remains at the bottom with 7.2 percent.
The comparison in absolute numbers also shows the lag of the used car market: In the first half of the year, there were 71,462 transfers of ownership of electric cars, but 184,125 new registrations – and for all cars, there were more than twice as many transfers of ownership as new registrations.
The offer is still rather limited
One reason for this is that there are still relatively few used electric cars. Since they have only been sold in large numbers for a few years, their share of the vehicle stock in Germany, which is the most important source of ownership transfers, is still comparatively small. In addition, cars are usually only sold second-hand after a few years, so new registrations from last year hardly play a role here. A search on the large online marketplace Mobile.de also shows this: Of almost 1.4 million used vehicles, only 65,000 are purely electric.
Electric vehicles have room to increase their share of the used market if supply increases. This is also indicated by surveys by market observer DAT, which has found an increasing willingness to buy used electric vehicles over the past three years. The main obstacle was the still-too-high price. Here too, however, the situation has improved: the residual values of electric cars have recently fallen sharply. A trend that, according to DAT, continued in May and June, albeit not as strongly.
Source: Stern
