Throughout 2023, passenger car registration in the EU increased by 13.9% YoY, totaling 10.5m units. All EU markets grew during 2023, with Hungary being the only exception. The largest markets, Italy, Spain, and France all noted a solid double-digit growth. Germany was influenced by weak year-end resulting in single-digit growth. In Croatia, Slovenia & Romania, in the mentioned period, passenger car registration reported an increase of 31%, 5.3% and 11.8% YoY, respectively.
New total car registration per month
Source: ACEA, InterCapital Research
In 2023, new passenger car registration in the EU increased by solid double-digit increase of 13.9% compared to 2022, totaling 10.5m units. All large markets reported a positive development. Italy, Spain, and France noted a double-digit growth, while Germany reported a single-digit development of 7.3% due to a weaker November & December, pacing down the growth. The largest increase reported in the EU in 2023 was in Italy, where the absolute increase amounted to 248km units, representing an increase of as much as an 18.9% YoY increase. Italy is closely followed by France at 246k units (16.1% YoY). Next up is Germany where the increase was 193k (7.3% YoY), which, as aforementioned, reported much lower growth during November & December. Finally, the last remaining major region within the EU, Spain, reported a strong increase of 136k (+ 16.7% YoY). The growth trend in Spain also paced down by the end of the year. Looking at the development in the region in 2023, Croatia reported a strong recovery with a growth of 31.3% YoY, while Slovenia remained relatively flat with 5.3% YoY growth during 2023. Romania noted a solid 11.8% growth during 2023. The last thing to emphasize is that Hungary is the only country to report a negative development in passenger car registration in 2023 with a 3.4% decline.
New car registration by power source (January – December 2023)
Source: ACEA, InterCapital Research
Categorization by power course
Petrol car market share still represents the biggest part of the pia with 35.3% (market share only down 1.1 p.p.), while the Diesel market share shrank slightly more pronounced by 2.8 p.p. to 13.6%. The decline continued its downward trajectory in the last month of 2023 in several key markets, including the biggest three: Spain (-26.5%), France (-22.2%) and Italy (-19.7%). In December 2023, new battery-electric car sales declined for the first time since April 2020 (when was the pandemic peak). The decrease can mainly be attributed to a significant downturn in Germany (down 47.6%), represents the largest market for this power source. The battery-electric car market share increased by 2.5 p.p. and reached 14.6% in 2023. Hybrid-electric cars surged during the year, resulting in over 2.7m units sold in 2023, and achieved more than a quarter of the whole EU market share with 25.8% market share (++3.1 p.p.). In contrast, sales of plug-in hybrid electric cars ended the year on a downward trend. As a result, the EU plug-in hybrid electric car market decreased by 7% compared to 2022 and now represents a 7.7% market share.
