Germany's new-car market crossed a line in October that the industry spent years calling unreachable. The Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt counted 94,086 new battery-electric cars — almost 80 percent more than in October 2025 — out of 254,492 total registrations, a market that grew just 1.7 percent. That is roughly 37 percent of the market, after September's then-record 34.5 percent. For scale, the full-year 2025 share was about 19 percent.
The more telling sentence is not the share but the comparison. Petrol cars took 15.1 percent of October registrations — about 38,000 vehicles, down 40.5 percent — and diesel 23,882, down 21.6 percent, a 9.4 percent share. Together that is roughly 62,000 combustion cars against 94,086 electric ones. Electric cars have now outsold petrol and diesel combined for two months running, this time by more than half.
Private buyers drove the shift: their registrations rose 20.6 percent to an unusually high 40.7 percent share, while commercial registrations fell 8.2 percent. Average CO₂ emissions across all new cars dropped 21.1 percent to 79.4 grams per kilometre — the first month below 80.
The powertrain mix beneath that moved too. Plug-in hybrids fell 7.9 percent, their first decline in a long while, to an 11.2 percent share. LPG cars nearly doubled to 2,065 units, 0.8 percent. Among brands, Volkswagen held 18.2 percent, Škoda was again the strongest importer at 7.7 percent and fourth overall. Of importers with at least 1.5 percent share, BYD grew fastest in percentage terms to reach 2 percent; Mazda, Kia, Dacia and Citroën posted double-digit gains. Among German brands only Mercedes grew, with BMW flat.
What the KBA release does not provide is a cause. The jump could be genuine demand for cheaper models arriving on the market, a pull-forward of purchases ahead of subsidy or tax changes next year, or both. Anyone reading the number as proof of a permanent turn should wait for November. European confirmation comes on November 24, when the manufacturers' association ACEA publishes October figures for the EU.
What is already clear: in the country that ended its EV purchase bonus in 2023 and whose manufacturers held onto combustion engines longest, battery-electric cars are now the largest single powertrain group in new-car sales — and petrol is collapsing faster than diesel.
