The number of new passenger cars registered in Finland last year sank to the lowest since the recession of the mid-1990s, the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency (Traficom) said on Thursday.
Just over 74,000 passenger cars were registered in Finland last year.
"Economic uncertainty is reflected in people's enthusiasm for investing in a new car. Sales of new cars have also fallen in many other European countries," Traficom chief specialist Outi Ampuja said in a press release.
According to Traficom, the number of newly registered passenger cars stabilised at just over 100,000 cars per year between 1997 and 2019.
The only exception was 2009, when new registrations dipped to around 90,000 as the Finnish economy grappled with the financial crisis. According to Statistics Finland, the country's GDP contracted by more than eight percent that year.
In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, registrations fell below 100,000 – and have trended downward ever since.
"There may be expectations of technological developments in the background, and we are still waiting for, for example, the prices of new electric vehicles (EVs) to fall. Some may be waiting for a suitable EV model for their own use to come onto the market. According to surveys, quite a few motorists are planning to switch to EVs in the near future," Ampuja noted.
Plug-in share dips
Last year, about half of newly registered passenger cars were EVs or plug-in hybrids, but their share declined by about five percentage points compared to 2023.
However, the long-term trend of the 2020s has been rising popularity of EVs and other plug-ins. Last year, fully electric cars accounted for 30 percent of first registrations, up from just four percent in 2020.
"This is a good thing for the environment, and hopefully the transition away from fossil fuels will continue despite the temporary dip in first-time registrations. The public charging infrastructure has continued to expand, which in turn will promote the transition," said Ampuja, who is also an adjunct professor at the University of Helsinki.
"People are interested in EVs. This is evidenced by the fact that of the more than 43,000 passenger cars imported used last year, approximately 76 percent were EVs or plug-in hybrids," she pointed out.
New registrations of mopeds and motorcycles have also decreased significantly since the peak years of the mid-2000s. There were fewer new moped registrations last year than at any time since 1995.
