The Estonian Association of Car Sales and Service Companies' (AMTEL) chief-executive Arno Sillat says that state support has enlivened the electric car market significantly.

"Last year, 77 of these were sold, so the percentage per 26,000 new cars was small, but this year, the same number has already been reached," Sillat said, and added that 22 electric cars were sold in June alone.

Volkswagen's official representative Moller's car sales consultant Tauri Tapvere said that before the COVID-19 pandemic, there were some customers that bought as many as 10 cars at once.

"At one point, it seemed that we didn't sell anything but electric cars. Last year was very quiet in that sense. There weren't enough subsidies and not enough models."

Kalle Kaldjärv, a member of the board of Eurostauto's official representative of Nissan, said that the market for electric cars is still small, however.

"At the moment, we can't say that a lot of electric cars are bought. The prices are high and people are afraid of the small mileages. However, these fears are unreasonable because new electric cars have quite big mileages."

Kaldjärv said that the prices of electric cars are not falling.

"Rather, the current trend is for fossil fuel car prices to rise as the EU imposes strict limits on CO2 emissions."

Kaldjärv said that people who have previously used electric cars are particularly interested.

"This is because they are used to the mileages and they know the advantages of electric cars. The other group is those who live in the Tallinn suburb of Viimsi, and want to avoid the morning traffic jams.

Tapvere said that new and larger models have been put on sale, which may increase interest in electric cars among those previously uninterested.

"A customer who is driving a larger middle-class car today doesn't really want to go straight to such a small electric car for various reasons."

Aive Haavel, project coordinator for the purchase of electric vehicles, said that a new application round will be opened in the autumn.

"Now that the larger summer holiday period is over, we will start setting this schedule together with the Ministry of the Environment."

Haavel said that more detailed information about the second round should come in the next month.

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