New BEV registrations on the rise – further incentives must now follow

In March 2025, new passenger car registrations in Germany fell by 3.9% compared to the same month last year. However, this month had one working day less, so the calendar-adjusted decline was -8.5%. This means that a total of 253,497 new vehicles were registered in March this year. This is the result of an analysis of the figures from the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) by the Association of International Motor Vehicle Manufacturers (VDIK). New passenger car registrations of international brands accounted for around 44.6 percent of the total market in March 2025.

Since the beginning of the year, a total of 4.3 percent fewer vehicles have been registered than in the same period last year. This amounted to a total of 664,571 passenger cars, including 286,399 vehicles from international brands.

“The negative trend in vehicle registrations with a drop of over 4% compared to the first quarter of the previous year shows that an economic recovery and thus customer confidence in purchasing new vehicles has still not been achieved. This should be a strong indication to politicians in the coalition negotiations of the need for sustainable reforms for Germany as a business location,” says VDIK President Imelda Labbé.

42,521 purely battery electric passenger cars (BEVs) were newly registered in March 2025, an increase of 35.5% compared to the same month last year. New registrations for international brands are expected to have risen by as much as 46.2% to 15,863 vehicles. In March of last year, however, the market for electric cars continued to suffer from the end of the purchase subsidy for electric vehicles for private customers in December 2023. This led to electric vehicle purchases being brought forward, with the result that registration volumes fell significantly in 2024. The BEV market share in March 2025 was 16.8% of all new passenger car registrations, around 4.9 percentage points higher than in the same month last year. A total of 112,968 BEVs have been newly registered since the beginning of the year, which corresponds to growth of 38.9% compared to the same period last year. International brands accounted for around 37.4% of this figure, meaning that their market share is expected to have risen by 2.0 percentage points compared to the same period last year. The total BEV market share for the first three months of 2025 is therefore 17.0%.

“On the one hand, the European Commission’s proposal to extend the deadline for achieving the CO2 fleet limits creates the urgently needed flexibility. New registrations of battery electric vehicles are increasing. Nevertheless, a share of 16.8 percent is currently nowhere near enough to achieve the CO2 targets. As the limits continue to become stricter every year, the deadline extension does not mean a delay in the efforts to ramp up electromobility. What we now need from politicians are long-term and stable framework conditions for higher customer demand so that the targets can be achieved in the future. The positive development of PHEVs shows that measures such as tax incentives in the fleet sector are working. At the same time, we see that vehicle fleets are still too cautious about purely electric vehicles due to the framework conditions and are focusing on PHEVs instead,” says VDIK President Imelda Labbé.

Plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) also recorded strong growth in March 2025 compared to the same month last year. New PHEV registrations rose by 65.8% to 26,553 vehicles last month. This corresponds to a market share of 10.5%, which is by far the highest market share since the end of the PHEV purchase subsidy in December 2022 and around 4.4 percentage points above the previous year’s figure, following the respective provisional highs in recent months. In the PHEV market, the international brands showed above-average growth in March with a preliminary increase of 108.1%, bringing their market share to 48.0% of the total PHEV market – the highest figure in over two and a half years. A total of 63,799 PHEV passenger cars have been newly registered since the beginning of the year (+41.8%), bringing their market share to 9.6% of all new passenger car registrations.

In total, electric vehicles – i.e. BEVs and PHEVs combined – accounted for 69,074 new car registrations in March, 45.7% more than in the same month last year. Their market share was 27.2% (March 2024: 18.0%). Since the beginning of the year, 176,767 electric vehicles have been newly registered, bringing their market share to 26.6%.

The number of new commercial vehicle registrations in March was 29,779, 14.9% lower than in March of the previous year. Since January 2025, 82,536 new commercial vehicles have been registered (-14.4%).

Source: KBA, VDIK

* Preliminary values