Canadian sales of electric vehicles increased by over 30% in the first half of 2022, although this is still well behind the rest of the world. At the United Nations climate conference in Egypt on Thursday, BloombergNEF reported on global EV sales. Between January and June of this year, about one out of every eight passenger vehicles sold worldwide was a battery-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicle.
That's down from 14% in the same time frame a year ago.
The period's total sales reached $4.3 million, up 70% over the previous year. According to BloombergNEF, they should reach 10.6 million vehicles by the end of the year, which is a 61 percent increase from 2021.
From January to June, China accounted for 56% of international sales, followed by Europe (28%) and the United States (11%). Although Canadian auto sales made up roughly 1.5% of the global total, less than 1% were electric vehicles.
According to BloombergNEF, Canada is "catching up" to the United States using electric vehicles. According to Statistics Canada, electric vehicles accounted for one in every fourteen new vehicles registered in the first half of this year, up from one in every twenty a year earlier.
Nearly 56,000 electric vehicles were sold in Canada in the first half of this year, a 35 percent rise from the same period in 2021.
But that's not keeping up with the global expansion.
By 2030, Canada plans to have 60% of all new vehicles be electric; by 2035, they hope to have 100%. To reach that goal of 60% of new car registrations, EVs need to increase from 55,600 to almost 480,000 in six months.
Brian Kingston, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers' Association, says that the lack of public charging stations makes it hard for people to buy electric cars in Canada. "We are not a frontrunner in terms of EV readiness at the moment," he admitted in an interview.
If Canada wants to get more people to buy electric cars faster, it needs to take readiness seriously.
The international accounting firm EY's annual electric-vehicle readiness index backs up this point of view by putting Canada at #13 out of the 14 countries they looked at this year.
Canada ranked eighth last year.
The Canadian Automobile Association has compiled a list of 80 battery-electric car models. The average price of these cars is $82,000.
Kingston said that electric vehicle discounts should be increased. Electric vehicles (EVs) with a starting price of $55,000 or less are eligible for a discount of up to $5,000 in Canada.
Advocates and experts say it's no coincidence that the highest sales are in Quebec and British Columbia, where additional provincial rebates boost the price even further.
Between January and June, more electric cars were registered in British Columbia than anywhere else. Although 11.4% of newly registered vehicles in Quebec were electric vehicles during the first half of 2018, just 5.5% were registered in Ontario during the same period.
