For the first half of 2026, battery-electric cars outsold petrol cars in Europe — 22.2 per cent of registrations against 22.0. It is a real milestone and it has been a long time coming. It is also narrower than most of the coverage suggests, and it depends entirely on which Europe you count.
There are two Europes in this dataset
ACEA, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, publishes registration figures in two groupings: the European Union on its own, and a wider count that adds EFTA — Norway, Switzerland, Iceland — and the United Kingdom. The crossover happened in one of them and not the other.
| H1 2026 | Battery-electric | Petrol | Hybrid | Diesel |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| European Union | 20.7% | 22.2% | 37.3% | 7.5% |
| EU + EFTA + UK | 22.2% | 22.0% | 36.9% | 6.5% |
Inside the EU, petrol is still ahead by a point and a half. The electric lead appears only once Norway and the United Kingdom — two of the most electrified markets on the continent — are added to the pool. And in that wider count the margin is 0.2 percentage points: 1,608,200 battery-electric cars against 1,590,767 petrol ones, a gap of about 17,400 cars out of 7.2 million. One weak month either way would reverse it.
What actually moved
The headline reads as an electric surge. Read the other column and it is at least as much a petrol collapse: petrol registrations in the EU fell 17.2 per cent against the first half of 2025. Diesel is now a rounding error in comparison, at 7.5 per cent in the EU and falling.
And neither one leads the market. The largest single category in Europe is the hybrid, at 36.9 per cent across the wider count — more than battery-electric and petrol combined in the EU. If you want to know what Europeans are actually buying in 2026, that is the number, and it is the one that gets the least attention.
BYD outsold Tesla in Europe
The manufacturer tables carry a result that deserves its own headline. In the first six months of 2026, BYD registered 174,144 cars in Europe against Tesla’s 170,351. Tesla grew 54.6 per cent year on year, which in most years would be the story; BYD grew 145.5 per cent and passed it anyway.
The rest of the Chinese cohort is growing from a smaller base and faster still. Chery, counting its Jaecoo, Jetour and Omoda sub-brands, reached 155,800 registrations — up 305.8 per cent. Leapmotor, distributed through Stellantis dealers, went from a standing start to 56,005 cars, up 558.3 per cent. SAIC, the longest-established of them in Europe through MG, remains the largest at 180,659, though its 18 per cent growth now looks sedate next to the newcomers.
How to check this yourself
ACEA publishes these figures monthly and they are free to read. When you see a registration statistic quoted anywhere, the first thing to find is the scope line at the top of the table: EU, EU+EFTA+UK, or Western Europe. The same month can produce very different headlines depending on which one an outlet picked, and the difference is rarely stated. The second thing to check is whether “electric” means battery-electric only or includes plug-in hybrids — adding the 10.3 per cent of plug-ins to the electric column produces a dramatically different story from the same table.
Both numbers in the headline above are true. Only one of them is the European Union.
Source: ACEA, New car registrations, H1 2026, and the accompanying June 2026 press release tables. All figures are registrations, not sales, and are taken from the published tables rather than from secondary reporting.
