How many electric cars are sold worldwide each year?

How to get close to this number

Work from total car sales and a share. Around eighty million new cars are sold worldwide each year, and the explanation gives the electric share as one in four. Multiplying a market size by a penetration rate is far more reliable than estimating the absolute figure, because both inputs are things people track.

The growth rate is what breaks intuition. A decade ago electric cars were a rounding error in global sales; now they are a quarter of them. Anyone extrapolating linearly from an older impression will be wrong by a wide margin, and exponential adoption curves punish linear reasoning more than any other kind. People outside China also tend to judge from the streets they know, where the share is often much lower.

The concentration matters as much as the total: China is both the largest market, where more than half of new cars are now electric, and the dominant manufacturer, supplying 60 percent of the world’s electric cars. So global electric vehicle statistics are, to a first approximation, statistics about Chinese industrial policy and Chinese demand. Note too that definitions vary on whether plug-in hybrids count, which moves the headline figure between sources.