Groupe Renault celebrates the 50,000th ZOE Zero Emissions car being produced at it's Flins Facility near Paris.

• Renault has produced its 50,000th all-electric ZOE
• Europe’s best-selling electric vehicle just three years after the launch
• Every three minutes, somewhere in the world, somebody purchases an electric vehicle

The 50,000^th Renault ZOE has rolled off the production line at its specialist plant at Flins. The milestone vehicle was sold to Sylvie, a French citizen from Saint Cloud, Paris. Guillaume Berthier, Electric Car Sales and Marketing Director, presented Sylvie  with the keys to her ZOE at the Flins plant near Paris, the only ZOE site for global distribution. 

It was Sylvie’s children who encouraged her to choose a ZOE and she intends to use it every day. With 50,000 people now proud owners of the ZOE, Renault has found that 98% of customers are satisfied with their 100% electric-in-use vehicle.

Since 2013, Renault has been the only carmaker to have a complete all-electric vehicle range with Twizy, ZOE and Kangoo Z.E. Since then, the EV market has grown rapidly, expanding by 48% worldwide in 2015. A total of 18,500 ZOE vehicles were sold last year for a market share of 20% in Europe and over 55% in France. In the UK, 4,058 ZOEs have been sold since launch, with sales up in 2015 by 102% compared to 2014.

Most recently, the ZOE was voted second best vehicle overall in the Auto Express Driver Power survey – one of the largest motoring consumer surveys in the UK, and has also been crowned What Car?’s ‘Best Electric Car under £20,000’ for three consecutive years.

Charging a ZOE couldn’t be easier thanks to the continuing rollout of new infrastructure. Today, more than 60,000 charge points are available to the public in Europe.

Renault announces a massive recall of around a quarter of all production of the ZOE Electric car.

Renault is recalling 10,649 Zoe electric cars to remove the potential risk of rupture to brake fluid hoses.

The vehicles were built between the car's launch in 2012 and Oct. 6, 2014 at the company's Flins factory, near Paris. A total of 42,300 Zoe cars have been built.

A Renault spokesman said the carmaker was preventively checking the position of certain brake hoses and replacing them if necessary, adding that it had not been notified of any accidents relating to the fault.

Nissan is expecting the next generation Micra to be more successful than the current version.

Nissan’s new Micra will have higher sales than the current car thanks to its larger size and wider range of engines, the brand’s Europe chief, Paul Willcox, said.

The next Micra will fit its segment better than the current car, Willcox told Automotive News Europe. “The car will be positioned right in the heartland. We will sell more than current Micra,” he said at a press event at Nissan’s factory here.

Willcox wasn’t specific about the wider engine line-up. The current Micra is available in Europe with two versions of a 1.2-liter gasoline engine.

Willcox said he expects European sales of hatchbacks such as the Micra to remain strong despite the growing popularity of small crossover/SUVs.

The new-generation Micra will go on sale later this year. It will be built for European markets at alliance partner Renault’s factory in Flins, France, instead of in Chennai, India. Renault is adding annual capacity of 82,000 units for the Micra at the plant, which also builds the Renault Clio and Zoe subcompacts.

Nissan’s head of performance, Trevor Mann, said the Micra will be built on a hybrid platform including some elements of Renault-Nissan alliance’s new CMF-A small-car platform. The first car to use the platform in its entirety will be the next Nissan Juke, which will go into production in 2018 in Sunderland.

The Micra is Nissan’s third best-selling car in Europe after the Qashqai and Juke.

Sales of the Micra rose 5 percent to 61,431 in Europe in the first 11 months of 2015, according to market researchers JATO Dynamics. Qashqai sales for the same period were 214,833, up 26 percent. Juke sales increased 5 percent to 94,706.

Nick Gibbs

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