Global passenger electric vehicle sales are projected to hit 23.3 million units in 2026, an 11 percent rise from the roughly 21 million sold in 2025, according to the BloombergNEF Electric Vehicle Outlook published this week. China still accounts for the largest share of that volume, while Europe, Southeast Asia, India, Mexico and Brazil trail behind with rising momentum of their own.
Colin McKerracher, head of clean transport at BloombergNEF, attributed the figures to a market that keeps expanding despite governments pulling subsidy levers in opposite directions. "The transition to electric vehicles is uneven," he said in the report's opening summary, noting that buses and two- and three-wheelers are closing in on 50 percent market share while cars, vans and trucks remain on a slower growth curve.
It's not clear this will hold. BloombergNEF itself flagged that road transport battery demand is growing slower than it had previously expected, driven by weaker passenger EV sales in some major markets and by the rise of plug-in hybrids and range-extender models that carry smaller battery packs. Stationary storage demand is picking up the slack, but that's a different business with a different margin structure.
Public charging networks grew 28 percent in 2025, according to BloombergNEF, pushing the global count of connectors to 6.7 million. The firm expects slower growth in 2026, though new installations are still set to rise by 19 percent. China continues to absorb the largest share of those additions, but the ultra-fast charging picture in Europe and the United States looks very different. Both regions grew their number of installed ultra-fast connectors by almost 50 percent last year.
That's the number that matters for drivers, not the headline sales total. A buyer in Munich or Atlanta cares whether a 250 kW stall exists on their commute, and right now the answer is better than it was twelve months ago. For charging operators the question is whether utilisation catches up to capital expenditure, and BloombergNEF's data doesn't settle that. The utilisation rate at a given site determines whether a multi-million dollar installation pays for itself within its asset life, and several operators have already conceded that early forecasts were optimistic.
Where the batteries go
Electric vehicles still account for the biggest single share of lithium-ion battery demand, but the trajectory has bent downward. Major automakers, led by General Motors, Ford and Volkswagen, are expanding their battery businesses beyond cars into large-scale energy storage. New cell capacity is increasingly being directed toward storage systems, especially in the United States, because the contract structures and warranty terms look more predictable than consumer vehicle programs.
The reason is straightforward. A stationary battery pack sits in one place, draws from a single grid connection, and generates revenue through arbitrage and peak-shaving contracts that don't depend on consumer taste. A car battery has to survive potholes, warranty claims and resale value math. The spread between those two returns is widening, and manufacturers are reacting accordingly by redirecting gigawatt-hours that were originally slotted for vehicle platforms.
Buses and two- and three-wheelers are the bright spot for road transport electrification. Both segments are approaching a 50 percent share of global sales, well ahead of passenger cars, and they pull less on the premium end of the supply chain. A fleet operator buying 200 electric buses can negotiate cell pricing that no individual driver gets, and the uptime requirements match the diesel baseline closer than private car owners assume.
Policy divides the map
The divergence between markets is not a footnote. BloombergNEF noted that regulatory changes are putting markets on divergent trajectories, which is a polite way of saying that subsidy rollbacks in some countries are landing at the same time as expanded incentives in others. The result is a sales chart where China, Europe and the rest of the world are moving at different speeds with no sign of convergence.
In the United States, credit eligibility rules and local content requirements have forced a restyling of several automaker product plans, with some models quietly losing tax credit status between announcement and delivery. European manufacturers face their own problem, which is a combustion fleet that still sells well enough to fund the transition while regulations insist it shrink. Asia outside China is growing from a lower base, which makes percentage gains look dramatic while absolute numbers stay small.
These policy splits also explain why the battery demand picture has changed. When a market that bought large-pack battery electric vehicles slows down, and a market that buys plug-in hybrids with 15 kWh packs grows, the aggregate cell demand drops even though the vehicle count rises. Automakers described this mix shift as a margin problem, not a volume problem, and their capital allocation is reflecting that view.
Long-term milestones and the Asian outlook
BloombergNEF's outlook puts forward a sequence of long-term milestones. Road transport oil demand peaks in 2029. Robotaxi fleets pass one million vehicles by 2033. Electric passenger vehicles cross 50 percent of new sales by 2035. Two-thirds of car, van and truck sales go electric by 2040. By 2047, electric passenger vehicles on the road outnumber combustion ones, and by 2050 an estimated 645 million tailpipe-emitting passenger vehicles remain in use.
Each of those dates follows from the 2026 base case holding. If the battery demand slowdown turns into a stall, the late-2030s projections shift right. The International Energy Agency's Global EV Outlook covers a similar period with different assumptions, and readers comparing the two should look at the vehicle segment breakdowns rather than the headline sales totals. The safest conclusion from both is that the direction is settled and the pace is not.
For Southeast Asia specifically, the picture is one of catch-up rather than leadership. The region is named among the markets where momentum is rising, and Indonesia's nickel supply chain positions it to benefit from stationary storage demand as much as from EV batteries. A reader in Jakarta should not expect the same charging density as in Shanghai, but the gap is narrowing faster than it did three years ago, partly because Chinese manufacturers are exporting finished vehicles and partly because local startups are building charging networks funded by domestic capital.
Reporting by the International Energy Agency provides a useful counterweight to BloombergNEF's forecast, particularly on the charging infrastructure math. Between the two, the cleaner read is the one that asks how many chargers are actually being used, not how many were installed. The capex has been spent either way; the revenue question is the one that determines whether the next round of money flows.
Our earlier EV coverage tracked the consumer side of this market, and the next twelve months will test whether 23.3 million sales is a forecast or a ceiling. Automakers have locked in production plans at levels above that number, and they'll find out by the second quarter whose assumptions were right. If the figure holds, the next question is whether 2027's number can repeat it without subsidy support that is already being withdrawn in several of the named markets.