Finland passed a motoring milestone last year. Final figures show that for the first time in history, in terms of new car sales, more plug-in passenger cars were registered than traditional combustion engine cars.
Altogether, 87,500 new cars were registered. The share of fully electric cars rose to 34 percent, slightly less than the share of petrol-powered cars. Only a few thousand diesels were bought.
A total of 47,000 fully electric and plug-in hybrid cars were registered, outweighing petrol and diesel models by around 8,000.
Tero Lausala, director of the Finnish central motor trade organisation, sees the shift as historic. However, he points out that some of the increase was due to delivery delays from previous years, when the pandemic led to delivery bottlenecks.
"There are several reasons behind this growth, such as the increase in the supply of electric alternatives. We can also see that companies prefer to buy electric cars: their share is up to half," he noted.
Popular even in chilly north
Fully electric was the most common type of new car bought last year through large swaths of western, central and southern Finland.
In general, the highest uptake of EVs was in Uusimaa, as well as few municipalities in Lapland – somewhat surprisingly, as cold weather drastically lowers electric vehicles' driving range. Lapland is a sparsely populated region with long distances between towns.
Half of all new car purchases in Finland’s northernmost municipality, Utsjoki, were also EVs – but that was only two cars out of a total of four. Likewise in Muonio, Lapland, the rate was 45 percent, but only a few cars were purchased.
Meanwhile, near Helsinki, just over half of all new cars bought by residents of Kauniainen were pure-electric, along with 45 percent in Porvoo, 44 percent in Kirkkonummi and 41 percent in Sipoo.
Industry calls for waiving car tax
As part of its 2035 carbon-neutrality target, Finland's goal is to halve road traffic emissions from their 2005 level by the end of the 2020s. According to Lausala, this will clearly not happen, despite the growing popularity of electric cars.
"The car fleet is being renewed very slowly, because very few new cars are being bought, at the same pace as in the worst years of the 1990s. Inflation and rising interest rates are also poison for the car trade," he said.
Meeting the goal would require Finland to have 700,000 chargeable cars on the road in 2030. That would be a drastic increase, as there are currently just over 200,000 of them.
The automotive industry argues that the emissions target could be reached by removing the car tax not only from electric cars, but also from other types of cars, as new vehicles of all kinds are less-polluting than old models.
"The average emission of new cars is 60 grams per kilometre, but the overall average of cars on the road is three times higher than that," he said.
Traditional combustion engine cars will be seen on Finnish roads for a long time to come, as there are still 2.5 million of them. The number of plug-in cars is not expected to exceed the combined number of petrol and diesel cars until at least the mid-2030s.
Finland still lags behind most other Nordic countries in EV uptake. In neighbouring Norway, fully electric cars accounted for 82.4 percent of the total new car market last year.
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