Demand for battery-electric vehicles across Europe (including UK and EFTA) keeps building, and in May they bumped petrol-powered cars down to third among powertrain types, trailing only traditional hybrids. Chinese brands added to the shake-up, logging 121,030 European sales in May, nearly double their May 2025 total and good for a 10.7 percent share for the first time.

 

When factoring in the UK, EFTA countries Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, as well as the European Union, total new car registrations rose 3.6 percent to 1.15 million units in May. In the EU alone, they were up 3.2 percent to 955,013 compared to May last year.