Ferrari's first fully electric model and Bentley's planned entry into the EV market later this year mark a symbolic moment: even the most traditionally combustion-driven names in the industry are shifting toward electrified powertrains, part of a broader transformation already well under way across the European car market.
According to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association's own published figures, battery-electric cars captured 20.7% of the EU market in the first half of 2026, up from 15.6% a year earlier, while hybrid-electric vehicles remained the single most popular powertrain at 37.3%. Plug-in hybrids added a further 9.8%, meaning combined electrified vehicle registrations now substantially outpace the fading combined share of petrol and diesel cars, which fell to 29.7% from 37.8% over the same period.
A separate analysis by data platform Tradingpedia, using a broader European dataset that includes non-EU markets such as the UK and Norway, put combined battery-electric and plug-in hybrid registrations even higher, at 32.5% of new cars, with hybrids close behind.
What matters most for insurers isn't the headline growth figure itself but where it's happening.
Tradingpedia's analysis found EV sales rising 81% year on year in Italy, 38% in Spain and 32.5% in Portugal, while some of the fastest growth anywhere in Europe is now emerging further east: Croatia's EV registrations surged 204.9%, Slovenia's rose 98.6% and Bulgaria's climbed 91.7%. That geographic spread is a genuine shift from the EV market's Nordic origins, where Norway's EV share sits at 98.3% of new registrations and Denmark leads Europe on EV registrations per capita.
The problem for insurers is that repair infrastructure and specialist technician availability, the two factors that most directly drive EV claims costs, have historically concentrated in exactly the markets where EV adoption started first. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has noted that the market for replacement parts and specialised repair labour for EVs remains under-developed in many areas, with the availability of qualified repair shops a direct driver of underwriting and claims costs.
As EV sales accelerate in markets such as Croatia, Bulgaria and Romania, where EVs still account for as little as 8.5% of registrations despite the recent surge elsewhere, insurers are likely to be pricing risk in territories with meaningfully less claims history and repair capacity than the Nordic and Western European markets where most EV underwriting experience has been built.
Independent industry analysis consistently shows comprehensive EV insurance running 15% to 44% higher than for a comparable petrol model, depending on the vehicle, driven primarily by battery repair costs, longer repair times due to limited specialist technician availability, and higher vehicle values that increase insurer exposure on a total loss. Battery replacement costs can run into the tens of thousands of euros, and even minor damage near a battery pack, such as a low-speed rear-end collision, frequently leads insurers to write off a vehicle entirely rather than risk an undetected fire developing later, a pattern that keeps EV claims severity elevated even as overall reliability improves.
That dynamic scales directly with the volume story in the sales data. With EV registrations now running in the hundreds of thousands across individual markets, Germany alone recording 531,799 and the UK 432,711 in just six months, the aggregate exposure sitting on motor insurers' books is compounding quickly, even before accounting for the higher per-vehicle severity each of those policies carries relative to a combustion equivalent.
The sales data also points to a detail with direct underwriting relevance: plug-in hybrids are proving unexpectedly competitive against pure battery-electric models in some segments, with certain PHEV variants outselling their battery-electric counterparts by a wide margin.
That matters because PHEVs carry a distinct risk profile from either conventional hybrids or pure EVs. Industry engineering analysis has pointed to PHEVs facing a particular packaging risk, since fitting both a combustion engine and an EV powertrain into one vehicle forces components into tighter proximity, sometimes placing thermal and electrical components close to an exhaust system, while their battery packs undergo a more punishing charge-discharge cycle than a typical full EV battery experiences.
For insurers, that means PHEVs cannot simply be underwritten as "part EV, part conventional car" on a blended basis, since the specific engineering trade-offs involved may introduce risks that don't scale neatly between the two powertrains it combines.
The shift Ferrari and Bentley's entry into EVs symbolises is already well advanced at the mass-market level, and the sales data shows it accelerating fastest in exactly the markets least equipped to absorb the claims consequences.
For motor insurers operating across Europe, the practical challenge over the next few years is less about whether to price EV risk higher, that's already established practice, and more about whether pricing models built on Western European and Nordic claims experience translate reliably to Southern and Eastern European markets with different repair ecosystems, different average vehicle values, and, in the case of PHEVs specifically, a genuinely distinct engineering risk that a simple "average of two powertrains" approach may not capture.
