Global passenger electric vehicle sales are set to pass 23 million units this year, a jump of roughly 11 percent from 2025 and the second record year in a row. That is the headline from BloombergNEF's Electric Vehicle Outlook 2026, published June 16, and it comes with a warning: the growth is no longer evenly shared.
The report expects 27 percent of all cars sold globally in 2026 to be electric, up from 9 percent five years ago. By 2035, more than half of passenger vehicles are projected to be electric. The numbers are large enough that road fuel demand is now expected to peak in 2029.
The nut graf is simple. The transition is still happening, but it is running on two different clocks. Emerging markets are buying EVs faster than the United States ever did, while the US and China, the two biggest markets of the last decade, are slowing for policy reasons rather than cost reasons. That split decides where the money, the factories, and the jobs go next.
China still accounts for 63 percent of electric cars sold globally in 2025, and almost two thirds of domestic car sales there are electric. BloombergNEF expects China to hold more than half of global EV sales through 2030. But the country's growth rate is easing as incentive rules tighten and the market matures. In the US, sales are set to fall 19 percent this year after the full withdrawal of federal support for electrification, including the rollback of national fuel-economy targets and the scaling back of the Inflation Reduction Act. Only 24 percent of the US fleet is electric by 2040.
Emerging markets are moving the other way. Nearly half of all cars sold in Singapore in 2025 were electric, followed by Vietnam at 39 percent and Thailand at 27 percent. Passenger EV sales in Turkey more than doubled in a single year, reaching 22 percent of all cars sold. Drive toward oil import independence, relative openness to Chinese automakers, and EV-centric industrial policy are behind that growth.
Chinese brands are winning the emerging market race
In Thailand, Chinese brands made up 88 percent of all EVs sold in 2025. In Vietnam, domestic automaker VinFast accounted for 98 percent of EV sales after volumes nearly doubled to 179,000 units. Turkey's domestic manufacturer Togg was the second-largest EV brand in 2025, behind BYD. The pattern is consistent: where local industry or Chinese imports fill the gap, adoption runs ahead of the US.
Aleksandra O'Donovan, head of electric vehicles at BloombergNEF, said the pace of the transition is becoming increasingly uneven across markets, driven largely by policy changes in the US and a maturing market in China. She added that the longer-term trend toward electrification remains intact, supported by improving vehicle economics, falling battery costs, and rapid adoption across emerging markets.
Batteries are still the bottleneck
Batteries remain the main cost component of EVs, and in many markets they are still too expensive for battery electric vehicles to match combustion cars on price. Battery electric vehicles in Germany, Italy, and the UK are still 17 percent more expensive than competing internal combustion cars, though that premium fell from an average of 34 percent in 2024.
China keeps the lowest battery prices in the world, helped by a mature supply chain, lower input costs, favorable financing, and intense competition. Matching those costs outside China remains a challenge, and North America and Europe are likely to keep paying more.
The Iran war and the resulting rise in pump prices have also boosted consumer interest in buying an EV, though BloombergNEF says it is still too early to draw a clear connection to higher EV sales over the near term. That caveat matters: interest is not a purchase order.
The fleet turns over slowly
Even with record sales, it is not until 2047 that electric passenger vehicles on the road outnumber combustion vehicles. Across all segments, more than 1 billion tailpipe-emitting passenger cars remain on the road by 2040. Over 80 percent of trucks, 52 percent of vans, 48 percent of two-wheelers, and 42 percent of buses are still combustion engine vehicles by then.
Andrew Grant, head of intelligent mobility at BloombergNEF, said slow fleet replacement rates mean a lot of combustion vehicles stay on the road in the long term, creating a headache for policymakers aiming for net-zero transport. He also pointed to roughly $2.2 trillion in annual spending on vehicles by 2035, plus another $524 billion in charging infrastructure investment between now and 2035.
The report also flags secondary effects. EV electricity demand is set to rise from 367 terawatt-hours in 2025 to over 2,700 terawatt-hours by 2040, requiring more than $800 billion of grid investment globally. Stationary storage battery demand is up 27 percent compared with last year's view, pulling in General Motors, Ford, and Volkswagen. City buses lead electrification, with over half of municipal bus sales already electric in more than 20 countries in 2025, and 60 percent expected by 2030.
For Southeast Asia specifically, the numbers are worth watching. Thailand's 27 percent EV share in 2025 came almost entirely on the back of Chinese brands, which supplied 88 percent of those sales. Vietnam's 39 percent share was driven by VinFast, a domestic manufacturer that captured 98 percent of the local EV market. Indonesia and the Philippines are earlier in the curve, but the same conditions apply: cheaper imports, oil import dependence, and governments that want local assembly jobs. Whether those countries follow Thailand's path or Vietnam's depends on whether local manufacturers can scale before Chinese brands lock in consumer habits.
Shared autonomous vehicles, or robotaxis, remain in the early stages of commercialization, but they are traveling far greater distances per vehicle than human-driven shared vehicles. Waymo's vehicles in the US reached a run-rate of nearly 110,000 kilometers per year in December 2025. That is a niche today, but it changes the demand math if it scales, because a single autonomous vehicle can replace several privately owned cars.
The full report is available to BloombergNEF clients on bnef.com. The press release with key takeaways is at BloombergNEF's Electric Vehicle Outlook 2026 page. For more EV coverage on this site, see our EV category.
The takeaway for 2026 is not whether EVs keep growing. They do. The open question is whether the US and Europe can close the cost gap with China before the emerging-market lead hardens into a permanent industrial advantage.