Global EV Sales Passed 20 Million in 2025

A milestone year for electric mobility

Global electric car sales passed a symbolic threshold in 2025. According to the IEA's Global EV Outlook 2026, sales grew by 20% to exceed 20 million units, which means that one in every four new cars sold worldwide was electric. The report counts battery-electric and plug-in hybrid models together, but pure battery-electric cars did the heavy lifting, taking 65% of the electric total and reversing the drift toward hybrids of the two previous years.

The 2025 result was also the fifth consecutive year in which annual sales increased by roughly 3.5 million units, a rhythm that has held ever since 2021. To put the trajectory in perspective, the world needed more than a decade to reach its first 10 million annual sales, a milestone crossed only in 2022. Doubling that figure in three years is a pace few industries ever manage.

The wider fleet tells the same story. The IEA estimates that about 5% of all cars on the road are now electric — up from a rounding error a decade ago — a global fleet of roughly 80 million vehicles that displaced around 1.2 million barrels of oil per day in 2025. Sales records were set in close to 100 countries, and in around 40 countries electric cars already account for at least 10% of new car sales.

China remains the engine of the market

No market matters more to the global tally than China. More than 13 million electric cars were sold there in 2025, according to the IEA — six out of every ten electric cars sold anywhere in the world. Monthly electric sales exceeded a 50% share in 11 of the 12 months of the year, lifting the full-year electric share of Chinese new car sales to almost 55%. Growth cooled slightly after Beijing temporarily paused its popular trade-in incentive scheme, but China still accounted for more than half of the entire global increase in electric car sales.

Production and exports matter as much as domestic demand. Chinese automakers supplied about 60% of the electric cars sold worldwide in 2025, the IEA calculates, and China built close to three-quarters of the roughly 22 million electric cars produced globally. As output outgrew home demand, Chinese electric car exports doubled to a record of more than 2.5 million units. Outside China, Europe and the United States, 55% of the electric cars sold were imported from China — up from under 5% just five years earlier.

Europe rebounds while the United States stalls

Europe was the fastest-growing major market of 2025. Electric car sales rose by roughly 30% to more than 4 million units, taking the region's electric share of new car sales to 28%, according to the IEA. The rebound followed the step-up in the European Union's CO2 standards for cars, which forced manufacturers to sell — and aggressively discount — electric models to stay within their fleet-wide limits. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Denmark and the Netherlands pushed well above the European average.

The United States moved the other way. The electric share of the American market stayed just below 10%, and the year ended on a sour note: after the federal $7,500 clean-vehicle tax credit expired at the end of September 2025, sales fell sharply in the final quarter. The IEA describes a classic pull-forward effect, with buyers rushing to claim the credit through the summer and then staying away once it was gone. Even so, the United States remained the world's third-largest electric car market by volume.

The rest of the world is catching on

Beyond the three big markets, more than 2 million electric cars were sold in 2025, and more than half of those sales took place in countries where the electric share has already passed 10%. Southeast Asia stands out: regional sales more than doubled to a market share of close to 20%, with Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand driving the surge, according to the IEA. Latin America's electric sales jumped by about 75%, led by Brazil and Mexico.

The IEA credits much of this catch-up growth to the economies of scale and cost-competitiveness of Chinese-built electric cars, which have brought EV pricing within reach of middle-income buyers years faster than earlier adoption waves. Nepal is cited as one of the clearest examples, with its electric share climbing rapidly as Chinese imports flooded in. Electric commercial vehicles are following the same curve: global electric truck sales more than doubled in 2025, and electric models accounted for nearly one in ten trucks sold worldwide, with the vast majority in China.

What 2026 holds

Looking forward, the IEA projects around 23 million electric car sales in 2026, close to 30% of the global market. The early data is mixed. First-quarter 2026 sales fell 8% year over year as policy changes in China and the United States weighed on the two largest single markets, yet Europe grew close to 30% and sales in the Asia Pacific region outside China jumped by 80%. In March 2026 alone, close to 90 countries logged year-on-year growth and around 30 set monthly sales records.

The IEA's long-range view is striking, too. Even with no new policy announcements anywhere, the agency projects the global electric fleet — excluding two- and three-wheelers, the most electrified segment of road transport — could reach as many as 510 million vehicles by 2035, up from roughly 80 million today. Battery demand, charging networks and grid investment are all scaling around that trajectory.

The IEA also argues that the current energy environment works in EVs' favor. With oil prices volatile, the running-cost advantage of charging over filling up has become a mainstream selling argument rather than a niche one, and several governments — including Vietnam and other Southeast Asian states — have expanded EV incentives as part of their response to the crisis. Whatever the motivation, from energy security to household budgets, the direction of travel is clear. In barely three years, electric cars have gone from one in ten new cars sold worldwide to one in four, and every serious forecast expects that share to keep climbing.