Eco-friendly car registrations exceed 1.5 mn in Korea

The total number of registered eco-friendly vehicles in South Korea surpassed 1.5 million as of end-October, up 38.3% from 1.1 million compared to a year ago, according to data from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT) on Nov. 20.

Registration of eco-friendly vehicles, such as electric, hydrogen and hybrid cars, exceeded 500,000 units as of April 2019 and 1 million units as of July 2021 in Korea. The country aims to increase registered eco-friendly vehicles to 2.8 million units by 2025.

The eco-friendly vehicles represented around 6% of total car registrations in the country, 25.4 million units as of end-October. Hybrid cars, EVs and hydrogen cars respectively accounted for 4.4%, 1.4% and 0.1% of the total cars registered in Korea.

Of the eco-friendly vehicles, hybrid cars were more than 1.1 million units, while EV and hydrogen cars reached 365,000 and 27,000 units, respectively. As of end-October, the total number of registered hybrid, electric and hydrogen cars soared by 29.6%, 72.7% and 54.3%, respectively, from a year ago.

In contrast to the rapid increase of eco-friendly cars, internal combustion engine cars saw very slow growth in terms of registrations.

The total number of registered gasoline cars in South Korea was 12 million as of the end of last month, a 2.7% rise from the year previous. Gasoline cars made up 47.3% of total registered vehicles as of end-October, but the figure was up merely 0.1 percentage points from the year earlier.

Diesel and liquid petroleum gas (LPG) cars registered totaled 9.8 million and 1.9 million units, respectively, as of the end of the last month. Diesel vehicles made up 38.5% of the vehicles, down 7.5% from a year ago, while LPG cars accounted for 7.5% with a 0.35% fall during the same period.

Write to Il-Gue Kim at black0419@hankyung.com
Jihyun Kim edited this article.