The all-electric Tesla Model Y crossover was Europe’s single best-selling vehicle of 2023, Automotive News reports quoting preliminary data obtained by Dataforce.
The agency points out that Tesla has set a historical precedent by outperforming every ICE car in unit sales on the European market. Perhaps even more impressively, the Model Y was the only purely electric vehicle in the top-30 best-selling cars last year, that is to say, not a hybrid.
The Peugeot 208, which had crowned the rating the year before, dropped to the fifth position in the rating. The Volkswagen Golf, which had held the first place for 14 years straight until 2021, plunged to the seventh place.
Tesla’s electric SUV benefited a lot from a massive surge of customer interest to it in 2023 compared to the preceding year. The U.S. company sold roughly 137,600 Model Y units on the Old Continent in 2022 and managed to boost this number by 85% to 254,800 units in 2023.
The Dacia Sandero, which landed second in the annual ranking, has also enjoyed a mild popularity boost – from roughly 200,700 to 235,900 units year-on-year. If you look at the monthly sales leaders, however, you will see that the Model Y has become the best-selling car in Europe on seven occasions so far, while the Sandero has only had four months when it outsold all competition.
The Volkswagen T-Roc landed third with an annual sales growth from 180,900 to 206,400 units. Renault Clio and the Peugeot 208 rounded off the top-5 list, the latter also being the only car in the top-10 to have actually performed worse than the year before.
According to Automotive News, while some of the cars in the rating are obtainable with all-electric powertrains in Europe, you can also buy them with more traditional engines. This makes the accomplishment of the Tesla Model Y all the more impressive: it had no ICE alternative to interest the more conservatively-minded buyers.