2024 Irish EV Sales

See your using the beep beep numbers to say hey look at the wonderful sales figures, I'm saying that's kinda misinformation as the business sales are not known, we know from the uk it's 1 consumer sale for every 16 business sales. You can argue that's not happening here but without any data to back it up it's only an assumption. Consumer sales could have actually declined in 2023 here.

Not only will you see a cliff edge in 2026 if nothing is done, you'll see a lot of them dumped back onto the consumer market, which may be a good thing for adoption if people actually buy them, they may still be happey enough in their ICE.

There's calls in the UK now to half the vat on new sales to help things along, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/05/electric-car-sales-in-uk-flatline-prompting-calls-for-vat-cut

The MYs due in Feb would have already been in transit when the 0% was announced. So there may not be enough in the shipment to meet any increased demand. Although from the way EVs as an overall percentage of sales are static, and the decrease in petrol/diesel has been picked up by 'hybrids', I don't think any change in EV financing APRs will result in a significant increase in sales.

Worth noting that for some reason all Toyota PHEVs get reported as regular hybrids. In 2022 it was discernable on stats as they used to publish the CO2 band of each car and half of all Rav4s were the Prime model.

Assuming that trend remained unchanged, that along with the Prius means there were an additional 600 PHEVs sold.

I'm not saying the sky is falling but from experience when you put in an incentive sales go up, take it away and sales go down. This has played out in other countries. The bik incentive is huge here and the closer we get to 2026 there's less of an incentive for a business to buy one. We've also had consumer incentives last year boosting sales.

I'm not wishing for this to happen but the government need a 5yr or more plan so people know what they're getting into. No incentive and no certainty isn't a good mix.

They are all far too expensive for what they are: an ICE car that had EV bits shoved in. Don't get me wrong, I like them. I would have quite possibly bought one myself (this time last year) had they made the entry level under €60k on the road, so the €5k subsidy would have gone off that too

This applies to the i5 too, the cheapest Paddy spec version is €90k which is insane. Not that long ago you could get an entry level 5-series for half that. A stinky rattly diesel, but still.

I think focussing on cost parity is irrelevant and nothing but a distraction. It's total cost of ownership that matters and new EVs are already far cheaper than equivalent ICE in many cases, even if you remove the EV grant. Unless you do way below average annual mileage.

All totally anecdotal but I’ve spotted plenty of 241s on the roads around my neck of the woods in suburban Dublin.

Majority of new motors in my estate over the last couple of years have been electric, ranging from MG4 to big eTron and plenty in between. Surprisingly no new Teslas or VWs though.

My parents live 5 mins away and you can’t move on their road without bumping into an ID.3/4/5/Enyaq, and their newest neighbours have two Teslas.

It’s turned to EV quite quickly, I didn’t think they would catch on so rapidly a couple years ago when I got my first one.

Some interesting stats there:

• Toyota's marketing department deserve their pay packets for seemingly convincing everyone that their petrol cars are EV "self-charging hybrids"
• BYD have had a strong start, beating the likes of MG and Cupra despite all of their pre-orders not even being filled yet. Seal outsold both BMW's 3 and 5 series. Let's see if it keeps up.
• Tesla did surprisingly poorly, people waiting for the Highland M3? Or the Irish public put off by the excess minimalism? The sudden 0% APR offer now makes a lot more sense.
• Mercedes failed to sell an single EQC. A car they would expect to sell a reasonable amount of. Oh dear 😂

so EV market share was actually down a little year on year?

that includes 66 Tesla V 1 last year, includes all the new models such as BYD too.

includes all the Jan company cars.

EVs are generally cheaper versus last year

skin it whatever way you want lads, I’m all for EVs but that’s pretty poor; awful really.

anecdotally we’ve all heard about EVs being a harder sell recently, and that’s now a fact.

@mailforkev - "It’s turned to EV quite quickly, I didn’t think they would catch on so rapidly a couple years ago when I got my first one."

It's natural in the S curve that comes with disruptive technology. Once you see momentum building up (like yourself and myself seeing mostly fully BEV new cars directly where we live), the full swing comes very quickly. Depending on the technology and how disrupting it is, it's usually a matter of just a few years

Here are some historic ones:

I never realised that the TV back 75 years ago had an even steeper slope than the mobile phone 😂

Great graph but I don't think we can compare EVs to other electronic consumables. The main difference is that vehicles have for a long time been a significant source of revenue due to additional taxation such as VRT, fuel tax, road tax, insurance levies and tolls. It is quite likely that as EVs become more prevalent, the cost of using them will climb also to make up for lost revenue from ICE. This could then lead to a slowdown of adoption.

The often bandied around targets of no ICE past 20xx can very easily be pushed back or straight up ignored by countries so it's not definite we are moving in one way.

I was at my AGM last night for my property development on zoom and we are getting EV chargers installed, they enquired about how many people had an EV already and about 8 out of 30 attendees had them, I think all the EV owners turned up and its more like 8 out of 100 have EVs, including 1 owner who said he had an EV but wont need to use the new chargers as his is "self charging":)

This is more of an Irish problem due to the poor charging infrastructure here than an EV problem per se. But until it's addressed and the public perception changed, we can't expect a significant ownership shift to EVs.

As regards an earlier post about poor Tesla sales, that's mainly due to keeping minimal stock in Ireland and it being delivered periodically (quarterly) from China. Tesla not alone afaik with not having supply in January. February figures will rectify that anomaly.

EVs only, year on year for January .

by model and by manufacturer

Very strong start for VW (versus last year - those cheaper ID4s are selling) - and overall themselves and Hyundai both had identical total sales in January (707).

EV6 and Ioniq 5 the big fallers, and as usual Tesla don’t deliver in January.

BYD did fantastic, considering the Seal only launched officially a few days ago. That’s without doubt the one to watch this year imho