Electric vehicle sales achieved a milestone in January with new car registrations in the category surpassing those of new petrol and diesel cars and sitting only behind hybrid options among consumers.
This follows a concerted push by the Government and the EU in recent years to get more electric vehicles on the road in order to meet climate targets. This has come through grants to help people buy electric cars, additional investment in public charging infrastructure to support these vehicles, as well as a potential ban on the sale of new combustion engine vehicles by 2035 in order to push automakers to focus more on electric vehicle development.
But while electric car adoption has been increasing, it hasn’t happened quickly enough for either the automakers or to meet climate goals. In addition, the EU are not pushing sustainability to the same level as it deals with other geopolitical matters.
Dr Fionn Rogan, of University College Cork’s School of Engineering, said that the issue of sustainability is going down the EU agenda, including the watering down of the 2035 combustion engine ban.
He added that despite an “anomaly” in 2024, electric car sales have seen a number of years of steady growth, but unfortunately, the public charging infrastructure to support them is “quite poor”.
In January, electric car sales saw a near 50% increase compared to the same month in 2025, recently released data from the Society of the Irish Motor Industry (SIMI) shows. In total, new electric cars accounted for 7.319 new private cars registered during the month, which means one-in-five new cars sold were fully electric.
By market share, electric cars outsold every other class except hybrid vehicles which just over 28% of the market.
With the caveat that this is just one month of car sales – and January is usually a very busy month for car dealerships with the introduction of new licence plates – the increase is still significant. In January 2025, electric cars accounted for just 14.7% of the new car market which increased to 19% throughout the year.
In 2024, when there was a significant drop-off in electric car sales, the category held 14.39% of the market.
Hybrid options have also seen a significant increase in the last few years – up from 20.9% of the market in 2024 to 22.48% of the market in 2025. Plug-in hybrid options increased from just over 10% in 2024 to 14.8% in 2025.
Over the course of just those two years, the share of the new car market held by petrol engine cars dropped from just over 30% in 2024 to just over 25% in 2025. Diesel engine cars fell from 22.9% to just over 17%.
Chief executive of SIMI Brian Cooke said Government incentives, expanding EV model choices, and a greater range of price points are all helping consumers make the switch to fully electric.
A recent report from professional services firm EY found that 40% of Irish consumers are planning to purchase some form of an electric vehicle sometime in the next 24 months. The primary reasons cited for the potential changes are environmental concerns, lower running costs, the increasing range of the vehicles as well as high fuel prices.
Among those 40% of Irish consumers, 15% said they intend to buy a full hybrid, 15% said they are looking at a fully electric car, and 10% said a plug-in hybrid option.
However, the report said barriers still persist with 36% of consumers citing uncertainty around charging and running costs as a deterrent, while 31% point to a lack of charging infrastructure in their area.
The top selling electric car in January was the Volkswagen ID.4, followed by the Hyundai Inster 3 and the Kia EV3. Tesla vehicles, usually ranking highly among most popular electric cars, were absent from the top 10 best selling new electric cars.
Tesla only sold 143 new cars during January — on par with the number sold in January last year — of which 93 were Model 3 cars and 48 were Model Y cars.
Meanwhile, BYD, the Chinese company which took the crown as the world’s largest electric car manufacturer from Tesla, was the fourth best selling electric car brand in Ireland during January with 716 new registrations.
There are similar trends being seen across Europe. In December, fully electric cars overtook petrol for the first time across the EU even as policymakers sought to loosen emissions regulations.
Europe’s best selling group was Volkswagen while, like in Ireland, Tesla lost market share across the bloc largely to BYD. Registrations of Tesla vehicles fell 20.2%, but BYD’s rose by 229.7%.
Total EU car sales rose by 1.8% to 10.8m in the year. December registrations of battery electric, plug-in hybrid and hybrid electric cars were up 51%, 36.7% and 5.8%, respectively, to account collectively for 67% of the bloc’s registrations, However, while the increase in electric car sales at home and across the EU are a positive sign when it comes to climate goals, the EU also unveiled a plan at the end of 2025 to abandon an effective 2035 ban on combustion engine cars, bowing to calls from struggling carmakers.
The newly revised proposals change the EU’s 2035 goal to a 90% drop in CO2 emissions, instead of the previous goal of a 100% cut.
Despite this, the Irish Government still has its own electric car adoption targets to hit if it is to achieve its own climate goals much of which now seems to be very unrealistic.
A significant pillar of the Government’s climate action plan is the target of getting 845,000 electric cars on the road by 2030. The country hit an initial target of 195,000 electric cars on the road by the end of 2025 but the rate of adoption would have to significantly increase over the coming years.
This means that 650,000 additional electric cars will have to be registered in five years or, on average, 130,000 a year. Effectively, every new car sold over the course of the year in Ireland would have to be an electric car to meet those goals.
In addition to that, under the Government’s targets, only plug-in hybrid vehicles contributed to the climate goals as regular hybrid cars are not considered as part of the electric car fleet. So the massive increase in customers buying new hybrid vehicles contributes little to reaching those targets.
Despite the vast majority of electric cars charging being done at the owners home, there still needs to be a significant amount of public charging infrastructure in order to support the growing number on the road.
In order to support the increasing number of electric cars on the road, public charging infrastructure needs to In order to achieve Ireland’s EU targets, established under the Alternative Fuel Infrastructure Regulation (AFIR), the Department of Transport expects there will need to be between 3,200 – 6,210 public chargers available nationally depending on the level of power supplied at each.
Transport minister Darragh O’Brien has said that due to the vast majority of capacity on the public charging network being provided on a solely commercial basis, there are a number of different estimates of available capacity on the public charging network.
According to the European Alternative Fuels Observatory, which is an initiative of the European Commission, Ireland has 3,990 across the country as of the end of December. However, growth in these areas largely stalled over the course of 2025. As of the end of March 2025 there were 3,825.
Mr Rogan, whose research also focuses on areas such as energy systems and energy innovation, said if we were close to the EU average “we’d have about 11,000 public chargers in Ireland”.
“If we were, if we had the kind of best in Europe, we’d have over 20,000 chargers.” Mr Rogan said they are working on some research with the ESRI, which has yet to be published, around people’s perception of electric cars and thing he noted is people’s lack of awareness of current charging infrastructure and how that might impact their views on electric cars.
“We found that about 40% of people said they never see electric car charging infrastructure, much higher than I thought because there is electric car charging infrastructure out there,” he said.
“I think there’s a perception that the charging infrastructure is worse than it is because people are not seeing it where they expect it, or they’re not looking out for it because they don’t drive an electric car. That perception that it’s worse than it is, it’s kind of leading to a perception that it’s quite inconvenient to have to charge because they don’t see the charging infrastructure,” he said.
He said that he is not concerned about electric cars having an outsized impact on the operation of the electricity grid because most of the increase for electricity is coming from data centers.
Transport Infrastructure Ireland and Zero Emissions Vehicles Ireland are currently undertaking an analysis to provide a more accurate measurement of the capacity of the public charging network. The National EV Charging Infrastructure Strategy is currently being revised for the period 2026 to 2028 and should be published in the coming months.
