Tesla Dominates Italian EV Market, Surpassing Fiat And Renault

In March, Tesla Model 3 Outranked Fiat 500's And Renault Zoe's Sales. In General Terms, However, The Automotive Market Is Lagging Behind Compared To 2019.

The month of March smiled upon Tesla Inc. TSLA, which — thanks to its Model 3 — conquered the title of the best-selling electric car in Italy. According to the data collected by the Italian National Union for Foreign Vehicles (UNRAE) on car registrations, 1,363 Model 3s were sold in Italy last month. This figure allows Tesla Model 3 to overtake other electric cars, such as Fiat 500 (1,056 units), Smart Fortwo (759 units), as well as Renault Twingo and Zoe (respectively at 738 and 721 units).

A Growth In The EV Market: Due to state and regional incentives, electric car registrations have experienced significant growth, now accounting for 4.3% of the total — a big step forward if compared with 0.3% in 2019. The incidence of hybrid cars is also increasing, with Fiat Panda at the top of the hybrid cars' ranking (7,867 units sold in March) and Jeep Compass leading the sales of Plug-In hybrids (898 newly registered vehicles). With regard to electric cars, Q1 pole position was claimed by Fiat 500 - with 2,058 registrations, - ahead of Smart Fortwo and Tesla Model 3, which achieved almost all of its sales in March.

A Drop In Car Registrations Compared To 2019: In general, March has seen a growth in car registrations in Italy, compared to the disastrous figure of the same month in 2020, when sales neared zero during the first lockdown. These data, however, still show a decrease of 12.7% against the ones of March 2019, while an 18.6% gain has been achieved since February 2021. In Italy, Q1 has closed with 446,978 newly registered cars, 28.6% more than the same period of 2020, which was obviously heavily influenced by the lockdown.

This article originally appeared on Financialounge.com and was translated from Italian to English. It does not represent the opinion of Benzinga and has not been edited. For news coverage in Italian or Spanish, check out Benzinga Italia and Benzinga España.