Top 100 Countries by EV Share in New Car Sales in 2025

EV share in new car sales shows which markets are moving fastest from niche adoption to mass-market electrification

The electric-vehicle share in new car sales measures the percentage of newly sold passenger cars that are plug-in electric: battery-electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids combined. For tracking the speed of transition, this is one of the clearest short-run indicators available. It reacts faster than vehicle-stock data because it captures what buyers, fleets, and dealers are doing now rather than what accumulated over the last decade.

This 2025 edition uses the latest harmonised full-year country data, which in practice is mostly 2024. That matters because the indicator is already far from marginal: the IEA says electric cars took more than one-fifth of global new-car sales in 2024, and the share is expected to rise above one-quarter in 2025.

Top 10 markets by EV share in new car sales

Table 1. Top 10 countries by EV share in new car sales

Chart 1. Top 20 EV shares in new car sales

Methodology

This ranking is built around the latest full-year country data available in the 2025 data edition, which mostly means calendar year 2024. The core definition is the share of new passenger-car sales that are plug-in electric: battery-electric vehicles plus plug-in hybrids. The main source base is the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook 2025 and the associated country dataset, with Our World in Data used as a convenient harmonised public layer for the same underlying series. The article presents the latest full-year values as a 2025 snapshot because that is the most comparable country coverage currently available.

Values are rounded for readability. Country names are standardised, and the emphasis is on cross-country comparison rather than month-to-month registration noise. Readers should keep several limitations in mind. First, this is a sales-flow metric, not a stock metric, so it does not show how electric the total vehicle fleet already is. Second, very small markets can move sharply because the denominator is small. Third, policy changes, tax timing, fleet renewals, and import availability can shift annual shares quite quickly. Fourth, a high EV share does not automatically mean a high number of EVs sold; China matters much more than smaller leaders by volume.

Insights and conclusions

The first big pattern is concentration. The top of the ranking is still dominated by a relatively small set of high-income markets where charging, incentives, and buyer familiarity have already crossed the threshold from early adoption to routine purchase behavior. The Nordic countries remain crucial because they demonstrate what happens when EVs become the default option for a large part of the market rather than an environmentally motivated premium purchase.

The second pattern is that volume leadership and share leadership are different stories. Norway remains the share champion, but China is the market that really shapes the global industry. Its near-half EV share on an enormous base matters for battery prices, scale economies, model competition, and export pressure in ways that no small market can match. That is why any serious reading of EV adoption has to look at both rank by share and absolute market size.

The third pattern is divergence inside Europe. Europe still dominates the upper half of the table, but 2024 was not a uniformly strong year across the region. Some markets kept scaling, while others felt the drag from subsidy rollbacks, weaker consumer confidence, or pricing pressure. The result is a much more uneven European landscape than the headline “Europe is advanced in EVs” suggests.

The fourth pattern is the rise of emerging adopters. Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, and several Gulf markets are still far below the Nordic leaders, yet they are important because they show where the next wave of adoption is forming. In these markets, cheaper imported models, urban fleet demand, and targeted policy support can push shares up faster than many analysts expected only a few years ago.

What this means for readers

For consumers, this ranking is a practical clue about market maturity. A high EV sales share usually means better model choice, deeper dealer familiarity, stronger second-hand development, and fewer uncertainties around charging. For businesses, it points to where charging, maintenance, fleet services, grid upgrades, and battery logistics are likely to expand first. For investors and industry observers, it helps separate two different stories: markets that already lead by share, and markets that may matter more by scale.

For anyone comparing countries, the main lesson is not to read the table as a simple “best versus worst” scoreboard. A 10% share in a very large market can be strategically more important than a 30% share in a small one. The ranking works best when combined with market size, income level, charging build-out, and policy durability.

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