Vehicle Sales Growth Since 2020 Is Entirely From Electric Cars

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There’s a popular narrative in the auto industry and among the mainstream media that demand for electric cars is shaky whereas demand for fossil-fueled cars is strong and consistent. The problem is: that’s bunk. Electric car sales have been growing and growing, while fossil-fueled car sales have been shrinking and shrinking.

We’ve covered this point here and there by comparing certain periods of time, but a reader shared a chart that does an excellent job of showing the long-term trend. Mike Shurtleff shared the following chart from Our World in Data:

As you can see in that chart above, which actually uses data from the International Energy Agency (IEA), fossil-fueled car sales dropped quite a bit from 2019 to 2018, before COVID-19 hit, and then they really dropped of in 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. The interesting thing, though, is that they never recovered. They were around the same level in 2021, and then dropped significantly again in 2022! They rebounded slightly in 2023, but even then were slightly below the 2020 and 2021 levels. Then, sales very slightly dipped yet again in 2024.

I think we can confidently say we’ve seen peak gasmobile.

Overall auto sales haven’t declined nearly as much, because electric car sales have been growing quite strongly. Even in 2020, they grew slightly to a new record, and then they more than doubled in 2021. They grew a ton again in 2022, and then grew in 2023 and 2024!

We’ve had 5 years of EV sales growth, despite seemingly common chatter about electric car sales declining. Is this gaslighting? Yes, yes it is.

Nearly 20 million EV sales were logged in 2024, out of just slightly less than 80 million. That’s quite an achievement and a great amount of growth from the effectively insignificant EV share of auto sales in 2019 or even 2020.

What does 2025 bring? We’ll wait and see, but you can also stay on top of the trends by checking out our monthly World EV Sales reports.

Thanks again to Mike Shurtleff from sharing the chart.