TUNIS — Tunisia registered 1,543 fully electric cars between January and July 2026, close to three times the 539 recorded across the whole of 2025, according to market figures reported this week. Plug-in hybrids rose on a similar scale, to 2,177 units.
Set against a total of 41,690 passenger and light commercial vehicles registered over the seven months, battery-electric cars represent about 3.7 percent of the market. Adding plug-in hybrids takes the combined share to roughly 9 percent. Counting all vehicles that use electricity in some form, including conventional hybrids, the electrified share passes 12 percent, against about 5 percent a year earlier.
The year-on-year growth rates are 525 percent for fully electric cars and 522 percent for plug-in hybrids. In seven months the electric segment has already reached 77 percent of the 2,000-unit target for the year mentioned in June by Ibrahim Debache, president of the national chamber of car dealers and manufacturers.
What produced the jump
The 2026 finance law is the immediate cause. It removed customs duties on electric vehicles, cut VAT on them to 7 percent, and halved registration and road-use charges. Together those measures translated into price reductions estimated at around 30 percent, which moved a set of models from aspirational to merely expensive.
Supply did the rest. Chinese manufacturers account for roughly 60 percent of electrified registrations. Among plug-in hybrids, BYD leads with 564 units, ahead of Omoda & Jaecoo at 392 and Lynk & Co at 309. In the fully electric category, Dongfeng leads with 557, followed by BYD at 293 and MG at 265; the Dongfeng Box is the single most-registered electric model, ahead of the MG S5 and the BYD Dolphin Surf.
The part the tax break does not solve
The constraint is now downstream of the sale. The charging network remains thin, technician training is limited, spare-parts availability and after-sales service are uneven, and there is no established route for handling batteries at end of life. None of these is addressed by a customs exemption.
The public targets are themselves unsettled, which is its own problem. The national strategy discussed in 2024 pointed to 50,000 electric vehicles and 5,000 charging points by 2030. In April, La Presse reported a target of 10,000 charging points by the same date; in May, Tekiano reported the national energy agency ANME working to 7,000 by 2030 and 12,000 by 2035. Three figures, one horizon. Investors deciding whether to install chargers cannot size a market against a target that moves by 5,000 units depending on which agency is speaking.
What would make the transition hold
The measures under discussion are practical rather than exotic. A charging-station code, reported as being finalised, would let companies and individuals install points under simplified procedures with defined incentives, and a digital platform would let drivers locate them; ANME has signed an agreement with Tunisie Autoroutes to equip the motorway network. Charging tariffs have been freed, which allows operators to price for a return.
The sequence matters. Tunisia has created demand faster than it has created the infrastructure to serve it, and imported nearly all of the demand it created — a 525 percent rise in registrations dominated by Chinese imports is also a foreign-currency bill in a year when the trade deficit reached 14.96 billion dinars by the end of July, energy accounting for more than half of it. Electrifying the fleet lowers the fuel import bill over time. Whether it lowers the overall import bill depends on how much of the vehicle, the charger and the battery is eventually made or serviced locally.