Italy sets record in EU for passenger cars: in Val d’Aosta there are 2.3 per inhabitant. Still behind on electric

Brussels – Italy is a Republic founded on…passenger cars. The Statistical Office of the European Union counted 45,667 million of them in 2022, with as many as six Italian regions in the top 10 in Europe for motorization rate. But conversion to electric cars remains a chimera: in the EU, Italy does better only than Spain, Greece, the Czech Republic, and Poland.

There were an average of 0.56 cars per inhabitant in the EU in 2022, Eurostat data showed. But considerable regional differences emerge, with over two cars per inhabitant in Valle d’Aosta to 0.08 in Mayotte, a French archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The podium is all Italian: the record motorization rate in Val d’Aosta, with 2,339 cars per thousand inhabitants, was followed by the Autonomous Province of Trento with 1,431 and Bolzano with 935. Six of the 10 regions with the highest motorization rate were in Italy. The other four were in Finland, Greece, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic.

Val d’Aosta’s record rate reflected favorable tax regulations and territory-specific conditions. At the other end of the range, the French overseas region Mayotte (83 passenger cars per 1,000 inhabitants) was followed by Greek Peloponnisos (203 per 1,000 inhabitants) and French Guyane (217 per 1,000 inhabitants). Four of the 10 regions with the lowest motorization rates were in Greece In addition to the two French overseas territories and two regions in Romania, the results obtained by the metropolitan areas of the capitals of Germany and Austria are relevant: in Berlin, there were only 331 cars per 1,000 inhabitants, and in Vienna 366.

The high number of passenger cars in Italy is actually reflects the past, considering that in the last two decades, Italy saw among the lowest average growth rates in the EU.

During 2002-2022, almost all member states experienced an increase in the motorization rate: in first place, Romania, with a rate of +5.7 percent per year, followed by Estonia (+3.9 percent) and Poland (+3.6 percent). At the opposite end of the scale, the Netherlands (+0.8 percent), France, Italy, Malta, and Austria (+0.7 percent), Belgium (+0.5 percent), Germany (+0.4 percent), Luxembourg, and Sweden (+0.2 percent) were the only member states to record average annual growth rates below 1 percent.

Netherlands and Sweden lead conversion to electric

The regions of the Netherlands and Sweden stood out among the EU regions with the highest share of electric cars. In the Flevoland region, over one in ten cars is already electric (12.8 percent), while in Utrecht and Stockholm, 6.6 percent. In the European top ten, four regions are in the Netherlands, four in Sweden, one in Luxembourg, and one in Austria. At the end of the line, with shares of electric cars close to zero, are seven regions in Greece and one each in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Spain.

The share of electric cars is also negligible in most Italian regions due to several factors, including government incentives (tax cuts or subsidies), availability, access to charging stations, and the supply of electric cars and their cost. Excluding the autonomous province of Trento (2.66 percent), only Tuscany (0.58 percent) is just over 0.5 percent. There are 158,000 electric cars in Italy, up from 12,000 in 2018. But still far from the 330,000 already circulating in the Netherlands, the nearly 600,000 in France, and the over one million in Germany.