Europe's carmakers rewrote their EV promises. Their EV sales kept growing.
Between 2024 and 2026, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Porsche, Ferrari and others walked back their 2030 electric targets. We checked what they actually sell, using only each company's own reports.
We looked at eleven European carmakers: Volkswagen Group and two of its brands that report on their own, Audi and Porsche, plus BMW Group, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Renault, Volvo Cars, Ferrari, Aston Martin and Jaguar Land Rover. For each one we compared what it promised about electric cars with what it says today, and with what it actually sold in 2025 and in 2026 so far. Polestar, which sells only electric cars and had nothing to walk back, appears in the charts for reference but is not part of the count.
The promises of 2021
In 2021 European carmakers raced to announce the end of the combustion engine. Volvo Cars said it would sell only fully electric cars by 2030. Mercedes-Benz said it was ready to go all-electric by the end of the decade “where market conditions allow”. Jaguar Land Rover promised every model in pure electric form by 2030, and Stellantis followed in 2022 with 100% electric passenger-car sales in Europe.
Five years later, most of those lines have been rewritten. Only BMW still states the same 50% target in its latest annual report.
What they actually sell
Here is the surprise: while the targets were being softened, the share of fully electric cars kept rising at most of these companies. Volvo Cars went from 21% of sales in 2025 to 32% in the third quarter of 2026. Mercedes-Benz went from 9% to 13% over the first nine months of 2026, and hit 17% for cars alone in the third quarter. That growth has a price: in the third quarter Mercedes-Benz Cars kept 2.5 cents of adjusted operating profit per euro of sales, down from 4.8 cents a year earlier, and the company cut its 2026 car-margin guidance to 2–3%.
Fully electric cars are only part of the picture. Volvo Cars sells more plug-in hybrids than fully electric cars, and at Volkswagen Group more than eight in ten cars delivered in 2025 still had no plug at all.
In absolute numbers, Volkswagen Group is far ahead: almost a million fully electric cars in 2025, including Audi and Porsche. BMW delivered 442,000.
Scale and electric share are two different races. Volkswagen Group sells the most electric cars, but they are only about one in nine of its deliveries. Volvo Cars and Porsche sell far fewer, yet a much larger part of their business is electric.
Europe is a different market
Group-wide shares hide a big regional gap. In Western Europe 21.3% of Volkswagen Group's 2025 deliveries were fully electric; in China it was 4.3%. In the third quarter of 2026, fully electric cars made up 45% of Volvo Cars' sales in Europe, and 34.7% of BMW Group's. In Europe, every third Porsche delivered in 2025 was fully electric.
Volkswagen says electric cars made up about 40% of its European order book at the end of September 2026, up 18 points since the end of 2025, and that electric orders rose 39% in the first nine months. It also says what that costs: in its nine-month results on 29 October the group reported an operating result of just €71 million, down from €5.4 billion a year earlier, after €8.7 billion of one-off charges that included a €6.4 billion write-down of Porsche goodwill. Its CFO said the company “currently earn[s] less from electric vehicles than from combustion-engine vehicles”.
Renault Group reported the same day that electric cars made up 25.8% of its passenger-car sales in Europe in the third quarter, up 12.2 points in a year, with electric sales up 84.7%.
Who held the line, and who hedged
BMW kept its goal of 50% fully electric by 2030 and launched the Neue Klasse: the new iX3 collected more than 100,000 orders in Europe within a year, BMW's most successful launch. Volvo Cars dropped “fully electric” but its electric share is the highest among the established brands we checked. Polestar sells only electric cars, but its sales were up just 0.6% in the first nine months of 2026, against a goal of double-digit growth.
Stellantis made the sharpest turn. It booked €22.2bn of charges in the second half of 2025, €14.7bn of it from “significantly reduced expectations for BEV products”, including the cancelled Ram 1500 electric pickup. Its new plan lists 29 electric models among more than 60 launches, but no target share. Stellantis also does not publish how many electric cars it sells; it reports growth rates instead: European passenger-car electric sales rose 65% in the third quarter of 2026 (93% including Leapmotor). Europe was also its only loss-making region that quarter, with an adjusted margin of −2.2% on shipments up 10%.
At the luxury end, Ferrari halved its 2030 goal for fully electric models from 40% to about 20% of its line-up; its first electric car, the Luce, is due to reach customers in late 2026. Aston Martin has no electric car on sale and pushed its electric investment further out.
The winner depends on what you measure
There is no single leader. Each measure points to a different company.
What to watch next
Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, Volkswagen and Renault have reported their third-quarter results; Ferrari follows on 3 November. The question is no longer whether Europe's carmakers sell electric cars, but how fast they can make them profitable while keeping combustion engines alive for longer than they promised.
Every company, explained from its own reports
Whatco turns annual reports into a one-minute story: who owns a company, how it makes money and the numbers that matter. Compare any two carmakers side by side.
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- Volkswagen Group: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
- Audi (brand): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
- Porsche AG: 1, 2, 3, 4
- BMW Group: 1, 2
- Mercedes-Benz Group: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
- Stellantis: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
- Renault Group: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
- Volvo Cars: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
- Ferrari: 1, 2, 3, 4
- Aston Martin: 1, 2, 3
- Polestar: 1, 2, 3
- Jaguar Land Rover (Tata Motors): 1, 2, 3, 4
