Canada's new electric-vehicle registrations soar in 2021 but still lag behind Europe
BNN Bloomberg
More new electric vehicles hit the road in Canada last year than ever before but the growth is nowhere near what is happening in Europe.
More new electric vehicles hit the road in Canada last year than ever before but the growth is nowhere near what is happening in Europe.
Statistics Canada says 65,253 new battery-only and plug-in hybrid electric cars were registered in the first nine months of 2021, more than the number registered across 12 months in any previous year.
In all of 2020, Canadians registered 54,353 electric vehicles, often referred to as EVs. In 2019, there were 56,165.
Data for the final three months of 2021 is not yet available but for the first nine months, EVs represented five per cent of new cars registered, up from three per cent in both 2020 and 2019.
Joanna Kyriazis, a program manager at Clean Energy Canada, said it is good news to see growth in Canada's EV market, but it's not keeping pace with Europe.
In 2019, France, Germany and the United Kingdom were on par with Canada with electric cars making up between 2.5 and three per cent of all new registrations. By last year, electric vehicles made up almost 18 per cent of new registrations in the U.K., 19 per cent in France and 26 per cent in Germany.
