Ireland becomes an EV-first market for the first time
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance.
How did DoneDeal determine Ireland is now an EV-first market?
Now, electric cars have overtaken hybrid to become Ireland's single most popular engine type for the first time, meaning Ireland is now an EV first market. This is according to Dundee Cars analysis of European data. And Paddy Common is head of automotive content and communications with Dundee and he joins me on the line to discuss. Good morning to you, Paddy. You're very welcome to the programme.
Good morning, Ciara.
So there's really interesting research here in terms of what people are looking for when it comes to buying a new car. What can you tell us?
Yeah, it's interesting to see it become an EV first market Ireland in terms of new cars. And that's a first for us. It's been a while coming. We've had EVs for a while. The gestation period was quite slow initially, but there's been a number of factors, I suppose, that really have accelerated the growth over this year in particular. Firstly, if you bring yourself back to the times when we had the fuel crisis, the fuel protests earlier in the year in February, March time, we saw a huge spike in interest in EVs on Dundee cars. We saw 100% increase in searches for EVs. So the interest was there because people were a little bit worried about the fuel supply and about the costs as well because petrol and diesel got very expensive.
Now, bring yourself back then to June when there was an announcement of an EV scrappage scheme that was vastly oversubscribed. There was 3000 applications and there was only 2000 grants allowed for that. And that gave an additional benefit of another €5,000 off the cost of an EV for people. So we did really see that jump in EVs. We saw in excess of 9,600 new EVs registered in July alone. So a really big growth in EVs.
In terms of where they've been registered, though, it's really interesting because it seems to be concentrated around the large urban centres in Ireland.
Yeah, it's not surprising that, like I said, Dublin and Cork accounted for almost half of all private electric vehicles on Irish roads. That was according to CSO figures. The main urban centres, Kildare, Mead, Wicklow, Galway, made up 70% of the national EV stock alongside Dublin and Cork. So that was a lot of the purpose of the EV scrappage scheme. It was weighted towards rural areas because there were some counties in particular where EV adoption had been quite slow. Your own county, Donegal, was slow. the likes of Mayo, Leitrim, places like that, had been a little bit slow to take up EVs, but that is starting to balance out anyway. So we're seeing a really good shift nationwide now.
In terms of our European counterparts, we would have thought before, particularly some of those Scandi countries, that they were well ahead of us. In fact, lots of our European neighbours, we would have thought, were further on in that EV journey. Where do these figures put us now?
It's interesting when you start looking across the EU, and it's great not to take away from the fact that we're now for new cars and EV first market. We're still a fair bit behind some of our European neighbours. We're ahead of the likes of the UK, Spain, Italy, Poland in terms of the new car market. But if you consider we're now about 26% of the new car market is now EVs. Norway's at 98, 99%. Denmark, 80%. finland 49 and those countries in particular have been really um forward facing in terms of of one in one side penalizing petrol and diesel cars now i wouldn't advocate for that but it did work and then they had the heavy incentives on the evs so um it's interesting as well here if you look at the national fleet so cso had come out with a figure last week that said that just four percent of ireland's total
vehicle fleet of about 3.3 million vehicles is now electric. If you compare that to Norway, they're at about 32%, Denmark's about 21%. So we've a long way to go to catch up. It's going to take probably a generation to catch up even to those countries. So it'll be some time to come before we'll see 100% EVs and sadly, probably not in your and my lifetime.
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