Brussels – Italy is a Republic founded on…private cars. The Statistical Office of the European Union counted 45,667 million in 2022, with 6 Italian regions in the top 10 in Europe for motorization rate. But the conversion to electric remains a chimera: in the EU, Italy does better only than Spain, Greece, the Czech Republic and Poland.
According to annual data published by Eurostat, in 2022, there were on average 0.56 cars per inhabitant in the EU, as in the previous year. But behind this figure, notable regional differences emerge, ranging from over 2 cars per inhabitant in the Aosta Valley to 0.08 in Mayotte, a French archipelago in the Indian Ocean. The podium is all Italian: after the record motorization rate recorded by Val d’Aosta, with 2,339 cars per thousand inhabitants, there are the Autonomous Province of Trento with 1,431 cars per thousand inhabitants and that of Bolzano with 935 cars per thousand inhabitants. Overall, among the 10 regions with the highest motorisation rate, six were in Italy and the other four were in Finland, Greece, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.
The record rate in Val d’Aosta was influenced by favorable tax rules, as well as by the specific conditions of the territory. At the other end, the small French overseas region of Mayotte (83 cars per 1,000 inhabitants) is followed by the Greek Peloponnese (203 per 1,000 inhabitants) and French Guiana (217 per 1,000 inhabitants). Of the 10 regions with the lowest motorization rate, 4 were in Greece. In addition to the 2 French overseas territories and 2 regions in Romania, the results obtained by the ametropolitan areas of the capitals of Germany and Austria: in Berlin only 331 cars per thousand inhabitants were registered, in Vienna 366.
The high number of private cars in Italy is actually a historical fact, if we consider that over the last twenty years it has been among the last EU countries for the average annual growth rate. In fact, in the period 2002-2022 almost all Member States recorded a linear increase in the rate of motorization: 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 other 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 of less than 1 percent.
The Netherlands and Sweden lead the conversion to electric
The regions of the Netherlands and Sweden stood out among the EU regions with the highest share of electric passenger cars in all cars. In the Flevoland region more than one car in ten is already electric (12.8 percent), in Utrecht 6.6 percent, as well as in Stockholm. In the European top ten, 4 regions are located in the Netherlands and 4 in Sweden, one in Luxembourg and one in Austria. Bringing up the rear, with shares of electric cars close to zero, are 7 regions in Greece and one in the Czech Republic, Poland and Spain.
Linked to several factors such as government incentives (such as tax cuts or subsidies), the availability and access to charging stations, as well as the supply of electric cars and their cost, the share of electric cars is negligible even in most of the Italian regions. Excluding the autonomous province of Trento (2.66 percent), only Tuscany (0.58 percent) slightly exceeds 0.5 percent. In total in Italy there are 158 thousand, compared to 12 thousand in 2018. But still far from the 330 thousand electric cars already circulating in the Netherlands, the almost 600 thousand in France and the over one million in Germany.
