Europe inches greener

Europeans bought just under a million electric, hybrid and natural-gas cars last year as sales boomed by 39 per cent from 2016.

New product has helped the boom, according to the European Automobile Manufacturer's Association (ACEA), with Toyota spreading its hybrid power to the growing crossover segments and Renault delivering a new, longer-range ZOE EV.

Underwritten largely by heavily incentivised Norway, sales of fully electric cars (BEVs) rose 49 per cent to 135,369 cars, while the German government's mid-year decision to add incentives helped plug-in hybrid sales to rise by 52 per cent to 460,418 sales.

Europeans have never bought anything close to the 935,355 low-emission cars they bought last year, with the growth easily outpacing the 3.3 per cent rise in conventional cars across the EU and its free-trade partner countries.

Yet, while the growth looks impressive, it's coming off a low base and accounted for just 6.1 per cent of the EU's 15.6 million new car sales last year, up from 4.5 per cent in 2016.

Pure BEVs still accounted for less than one per cent of the new car market in Europe though, at just 0.9 per cent of the market.

Car-makers spent the second half of last year backing away from publicising diesel power and instead moved to attaching the nascent mild-hybrid 48-volt systems to petrol power as the way to meet tighter 2020 EU CO2 emissions regulations.

Unlike plug-in hybrid and BEV power, mild-hybrids use the higher power of the electrical systems to quickly swap braking energy into electrical energy, which is then used to boost the engines under acceleration, thanks to belt-driven starter-generator units.

Effectively, they make the starter motors do double duty as electric-powered performance boosters when the torque demands are high.

But while they argue mild-hybrid is the baseline powertrain of the future, they are isolated at the high end of the premium market at the moment, with Audi, Mercedes-Benz and BMW the only serious contenders, though Volkswagen-branded cars are soon to follow.

Toyota has all but abandoned diesel power in Europe, with its hybrids selling 38 per cent better than in 2016 and now tally up to more than 40 per cent of its European sales.

The ZOE had its range boosted by 67 per cent to 400km in 2017, which accounted for its boost in sales, while the new Nissan LEAF, which shares its battery and powertrain technology, will arrive in force later this year.