Vehicle electrification
Two numbers matter and they are a decade apart: the share of new cars that plug in, which tells you where the market is going, and the share of the fleet on the road, which tells you what is actually burning fuel today.
Sales, by region
Global sales grew 20% in 2025. Almost two thirds of them were in China, Europe rebounded 33%, and the United States went backwards after its federal purchase credit was withdrawn at the end of September.
Plug-in share of new car sales, 2025
Battery-electric plus plug-in hybrid, as a share of new cars sold. Conventional hybrids are excluded — they do not plug in and do not shift any load onto the grid.
The gap between selling and driving
This is the chart most coverage misses. Cars last 15 to 20 years, so even Norway — where 95% of new cars plug in — has an existing fleet that is only about a third electric. The length of each bar is the transition still queued up in the vehicle stock.
Adoption curves
Every market that has passed roughly 5% follows a similar S-curve, but policy can dent it. Germany's 2023–24 fall is the clearest natural experiment available: purchase subsidies ended abruptly in December 2023 and share dropped for two years before recovering.
When new combustion cars stop being sold
Several of these dates were firm two years ago and are not now. The status column reflects where each one actually stands in mid-2026, not when it was announced.
The clearest policy signal in this dataset. US plug-in sales fell 4% in 2025, the first annual decline in the world's second-largest market, after the $7,500 federal credit ended on 30 September 2025. Germany's 2023–24 dip has the same shape and the same cause. Purchase incentives do not create demand permanently, but removing them abruptly reliably removes demand.
Latest coverage
Headlines from third-party publishers, linked in full. Nothing here feeds the figures above — it is context, not source data. All headlines.