Where Europe’s used cars come from — and where its electric ones do

Origin here is the nationality a brand carries: the one the market still uses, even where the corporate reality has moved on. A Volkswagen is German, a Fiat is Italian, a Volvo is Swedish.

That matters because intuition is not consistent. Most readers think of Volvo as Swedish, which is what heritage gives; many think of Škoda as German, which is what ownership gives. Heritage applies one rule to both cases. Intuition applies a different one to each.

Ownership does not resolve into countries either. Grouped by owner, brands from several different origins would collapse into a single group, and Stellantis is not a place.

The choice moves whole categories, not just one number. Czechia’s share here is Škoda and little else; by ownership it would move to Germany. Sweden’s share at home is almost entirely Volvo; by ownership it would move to China. Counted by heritage, Chinese brands are 0.54% of listings; counted by ownership, 4.36%, a factor of 8 on the same data.

The full ownership view would need a second mapping, which has not been built. The statements above describe which brands would move, not measured shares.

Japanese brands fall back in every market. In the Netherlands the share drops from 12.6 to 6.8 per cent, in Denmark from 8.7 to 2.5, in Germany from 6.6 to 2.7. There is no market where Japanese brands hold their position in electric listings.

Chinese brands appear in every market. From a base of 0.3 to 1.3 per cent of all listings, they reach 1.1 to 4.7 per cent of electric listings. The share remains small in absolute terms, but the proportional movement is large.

German brands lead both segments in every market, but not evenly. They lose ground in some markets, with Austria falling from 48.0 to 39.0 per cent and Belgium from 42.6 to 30.7, and gain in others: Denmark rises from 37.9 to 44.7, Spain from 28.9 to 33.3.

Which markets fall into which group is not stable: the German figure for Belgium’s electric segment has covered a 30.7–51.5 per cent band over the window. Across markets, French brands run from -6.1 percentage points in Denmark to 18.8 in Belgium, German brands from -11.9 in Belgium to 6.8 in Denmark. Both extremes fall in the same market, which is what a column summing to zero looks like. Japanese and Chinese brands are the patterns that hold; the large European origins are not.

Chinese ownership in the electric segment

In the electric segment the heritage/ownership distinction moves the headline figure more than it does across the market as a whole.

Brands of Chinese heritage, among them BYD, XPeng and Maxus, account for 1.1 to 4.7 per cent of electric listings depending on the market. Adding the brands with Chinese majority owners raises that figure: Volvo and Polestar (Geely), and MG and Lotus (SAIC and Geely) are all counted as European here, and all four are present in the electric segment.

The ownership is a shareholding, not a relocation. Volvo Cars is headquartered in Gothenburg and listed in Stockholm; MG is designed and largely built in Europe under SAIC ownership. Whether that ownership is the relevant fact depends on the question being asked, which is why this report is built on heritage and states the alternative rather than choosing between them silently.

The segment matters for which brands appear at all. A brand that sells mainly plug-in hybrids counts towards the overall market and not towards the electric segment, so the set of Chinese-heritage brands is not the same in the two columns.

Descriptive patterns in listing data. Movements may reflect market dynamics, mix shifts, seasonality or data artefacts; no causal claims are made.

• Listings, not sales. Figures show what dealers advertise, not what they sell. A listing is a seller’s decision to bring a car to market, which is an early signal of where sellers think demand is.
• Share is of new listings that month, not of total inventory. A share sounds like a statement about the state of the market; that is not what is measured here.
• The anchor month is a choice, not a date stamp. Figures describe the anchor month. Where a figure moves materially across the window, this report says so; and the more narrowly a figure is cut, the more it moves. A single model within a single brand in a single market rests on a few thousand listings and can shift several points between months; a whole market’s top ten rests on hundreds of thousands and barely moves.
• One source per market. Each market’s share is calculated against that market’s own listings. Because coverage differs between countries, levels are comparable as proportions but rest on slightly different underlying populations.
• One population per report. Each report is computed against its own population, chosen for the question that report asks. Where two reports describe the same market and the same month, their figures may still differ, and they are not designed to add up.
• Movement, not trend. Seasonal comparison needs a longer window than this report covers. Movement within the window is described; it is not read as direction.

Specific to this report:

• Origin is brand heritage: not the country of assembly, not the country of previous registration, and not corporate ownership. Where ownership figures are given, they are stated as such and counted brand by brand.
• The ownership count is a floor. Brands with Chinese majority owners are identified individually rather than from a complete ownership mapping. Other brands under Chinese ownership may be mapped to other origins and are not counted.
• A cell can rest on a single brand. The asterisk marks cells built on few electric listings, not cells where one brand carries most of the movement. Both occur, and the figure distinguishes only the first.
• Two segments, two denominators. All listings and electric listings are each calculated against their own total. Cells resting on very few electric listings are marked in the difference figure and carry little weight.
• The difference is not comparable between markets. Because the overall segment contains the electric one, each column is scaled by that market’s non-electric share. A market with a high electric share produces smaller figures for the same underlying contrast.
• The electric segment is battery-electric only. Plug-in hybrids belong to the overall market, not to the electric segment. A brand whose listings are mostly plug-in hybrid therefore appears in the overall column but not in the electric one.
• Light commercial vehicles are included and are counted alongside passenger cars. Van models are nationally concentrated, so each market’s origin figures carry a component from vans that differs in size between markets.
• New brands appear each month. The origin mapping is rebuilt before each run; anything unmapped reduces the denominator rather than vanishing from it.