The black year of the electric car: in 2022 sales collapse

Italians buy less and less new cars. Much less electric, despite the incentives and the massive hype concocted around the latter. The market recovery that began in August and progressively extended to all types of food was not enough to end the year on a positive note: the general decline compared to 2021 was 9.7 percent. In fact, in the last five months of 2022, the growth in registrations was constant to close in December with a plus of 21 percent. In this month, all fuels recorded significant increases with the exception of methane, decimated by the increase in refueling prices, and cars with plugs: plug-in hybrids, but above all electric ones, which show a drop of almost 26 per cent percent in December and 26.6 compared to all of 2022.

Sales of new cars in the year just ended were therefore lower not only compared to 2021, but also to the 2020 pandemic and very close to that 1,304,500 registrations registered in 2013, which represents the historical minimum since 1978at the dawn of the second oil shock.

The fall in electric car registrations – in sharp contrast with the market average – gradually worsened in the second half of 2022, and expensive energy probably also contributed to it. Indeed, recharging electric cars has become more expensive than refuelling, with any fuel with the exception of the extremely expensive methane, both if carried out at the columns and in the domestic garage. Indeed, there was the other unpleasant and unexpected reversal of the higher price of recharging with the wallbox compared to the public column, at least compared to that of recharging at the non-ultra-fast column.

The greater outlay for the use of the latter, if desired, can be compared to motorway refuelling. With the fundamental difference that all endothermic cars can venture onto the motorway, from city cars to historic cars, even for longer distances which are decidedly not recommended for electric cars with small batteries. Difficult to generalize: the prices of top-ups (with or without season tickets, etc.) are many, and not easily comparable as in other sectors, and there are also consumers who top up at the expense of their employer or who benefit from their own system photovoltaic (also encouraged, of course).

But who can afford the latter in a condominium or more generally in the city? Yet it is precisely here that electric cars, being able to recover energy by slowing down like hybrids, perform at their best. Today, however, after the short-term reset of the cut in excise duties, the supply price differential remains: suffice it to consider that the wholesale price of electricity bought and sold in Italy as early as September 2021 stood at values ​​well more than double only compared to the 2020 price, but also compared to normal years.

The collapse in sales of electric cars clashes with the significant increase in the offer which now has as many as 89 models. Those that can be purchased powered by LPG, for example, are only 34 and yet they have registered registrations of over 118 thousand units, a number that exceeds the sum of electric and plug-in hybrids sold in the same period.

In the writer’s humble opinion, due to a not small and non-trivial set of factors, which evidently goes far beyond habits (which also change quickly in the face of convenience, see smart working), electric cars in particular today, and indeed for quite a while longer, they are not a perfect replacement for internal combustion cars for the majority of motorists, at least for the Italian ones. The disbursement of incentives in 2022 is also proof of this.

In fact, if the 170 million destined for plug-free cars were consumed in less than twenty days from the opening of reservations, despite the very modest unit amount and the obligation to scrap them, those destined for electric and plug-in hybrids remained unused for more than 288 million, albeit of a higher unit amount and without the obligation to scrap. The new incentives have been in force since yesterday: it is safe to bet that they will be snapped up again for non-electric cars.