Battery-electric cars take a record 37% of German registrations in October

Battery-electric cars took 37.0% of Germany's new-car registrations in October 2026, the Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA) reported on November 4. That is 94,086 cars, up 79.5% on October 2025, in a market that grew 1.7% to 254,492.

The growth came out of combustion. Petrol registrations fell 40.5% to 38,516 (15.1%) and diesel fell 21.6% to 23,882 (9.4%), so the two together came to 62,398 cars, about two-thirds of the battery-electric count by our arithmetic. Hybrids, a category in which the KBA includes plug-ins, slipped 5.6% to 95,931 and remained the largest category at 37.7%. Battery-electric cars finished 1,845 registrations behind them. Plug-in hybrids alone fell 7.9% to 28,499 (11.2%).

October caps a steady climb: 29.3% in July, 32.4% in August and 34.5% in September. October is the third month running in which battery-electric cars outnumbered petrol and diesel combined; in July the combustion pair still held 30.7% (18.9% petrol, 11.8% diesel). By our reading of the KBA's monthly figures back to January 2021, 37.0% is a record. The highest share before 2026 was 33.2% in December 2022, when 104,325 of 314,318 new cars were battery-electric, per the KBA's FZ28 statistics.

From January through October, Germany registered 698,230 battery-electric cars, 28.2% of the market and 60.7% more than a year earlier. That is already 153,088 more than in all of 2025, when 545,142 took 19.1%, by our arithmetic. Private buyers grew while companies pulled back: private registrations rose 20.6% to a 40.7% share, while commercial registrations fell 8.2%. Average CO2 emissions of the month's new cars dropped 21.1% to 79.4 g/km.