Worldwide sales of electric vehicles reached 20.7 million in 2025, a 20% increase that pushed EVs to roughly a quarter of all cars sold globally. The International Energy Agency said China accounted for about 60% of those sales, making it the center of the market as the newest electric cars kept moving from niche product to mass-market default.
Alex Kimani, a veteran finance writer, investor, engineer and researcher for Safehaven.com, said the scale of the shift is hard to miss because China alone sold 12.86 million passenger new energy vehicles in 2025, up 19% from a year earlier. That was enough for China’s new energy vehicles to outsell traditional internal combustion engine cars for the first time, while Chinese automakers sold 34.35 million vehicles worldwide and took 35.6% of the global market.
The latest numbers help explain why readers are searching for the newest electric cars now: the market is no longer being defined by hype or promises, but by actual volume. China also became the world’s leading automotive exporter in 2025, overtaking Japan as total auto exports jumped 21% to more than 7 million units, driven largely by strong demand in South America and Southeast Asia. BYD led the domestic fight with 3.5 million registrations and a 27% share of China’s new energy vehicle market, while Geely nearly doubled its EV sales and held 12.4% of the market.
But the global picture was not uniform. U.S. electric vehicle sales totaled 1.8 million units in 2025 and fell 4% even as the world market surged, a drop tied in part to the removal of incentives after Congress passed OBBBA and terminated the main federal Clean Vehicle purchase and used EV tax credits for vehicles acquired after Sept. 30, 2025. Sales in the United States surged in double digits before that deadline and then fell sharply afterward, leaving the market more dependent on brand strength and pricing than on policy support.
That split matters because the pace of adoption is now being set in different ways on each side of the Pacific. Tesla’s U.S. sales slipped about 7% to an estimated 589,160 units from 634,000 in 2024, even as its market share rose from around 43% at the start of 2025 to more than 56% by year-end. General Motors and Volkswagen posted gains above 100% in some periods, Hyundai rose 45%, and Europe’s battery electric vehicle sales climbed 29.7% to 2.58 million units, underscoring how quickly the contest around the newest electric cars is shifting from whether the market will grow to who will own it.
What comes next is a market shaped less by a single subsidy deadline than by the balance between falling costs, tougher emissions rules and the flood of cheaper models from major manufacturing hubs. The unanswered question is not whether electric vehicles will keep growing, but how much of the next surge will come from China’s scale and how quickly U.S. buyers return without the federal credit that once helped steer them there.
