November 29, 2024

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Kia's all-electric sports utility vehicle EV6 (Kia)

South Korea saw its number of eco-friendly vehicles exceed 1.5 million in October, data showed Sunday.

According to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport, a total of 1,515,000 units of eco-friendly vehicles, including full electric vehicles and hybrids, were registered by the end of October -- a 38.3 percent surge on-year.

This comes just one year and three months after the country saw the number of eco-friendly vehicles exceed 1 million in July 2021.

The ministry’s data showed that green vehicles are now responsible for up to 5.96 percent of South Korea’s registered cars -- an increase from 4.65 percent last year.

Among registered eco-friendly cars, hybrids made up the biggest part with 1,121,000 units, followed by electric vehicles with 365,000 units and hydrogen-powered cars with 27,000 units.

The number of registered EVs saw the biggest surge with a 72.7 percent jump on-year in October on brisk global demand for eco-friendly cars.

The ministry expects that with such rapid growth in the number of eco-friendly cars, they are likely to achieve the goal to have 2.83 million green cars on the road by 2025.

In the meantime, the number of registered gasoline-powered cars saw a tiny 2.7 percent growth over the past year, with a total of 12,013,000 registered units.

The number of registered diesel cars and LPG-powered cars, on the other hand, dropped by 1.1 percent and 1.9 percent in October compared to the same month last year respectively down to 9,779,000 units of diesel cars and 1,913,000 units of LPG-powered cars.

By Hong Yoo (yoohong@heraldcorp.com)