A bright spot in a world seemingly going crazy: EV sales continue to boom despite the naysayers
Global and US electric vehicle sales are set to boom in 2025. This is great news and we’re already far surpassing even my most optimistic sales projections over the past decade that I’ve been writing on this topic.
In my previous “Solar Singularity” updates over the years, I’ve tracked the intertwined revolutions of solar power, battery storage, EVs and self-driving technology. The EV revolution has consistently shown strong growth, though with some bumps along the way. Let’s look at where we are now and where we’re headed.
Back in 2020, I wrote that “light-duty EV sales will probably rise at a faster pace in the coming few years as more models become available, prices continue to decline and more people start to realize how much better EVs are than ‘normal’ cars.” That prediction has proven quite accurate, though the pace of sales has exceeded even my optimistic expectations.
The recent Gartner EV sales forecast projects that we’ll have about 85 million EVs on global roads by the end of 2025, with battery electric vehicles (BEVs) comprising 73% of that total at 62 million vehicles. This represents a 33% increase in total EVs from 2024 to 2025 — remarkable growth that shows the EV revolution is well underway. China continues to lead with 58% of global EV sales, followed by Europe at 24%.
Looking back at my 2020 analysis (the last time I wrote about global EV sales), I noted that Norway was showing us the future with 70% of new car sales being EVs at that time. Now in 2025, Norway regularly sees monthly EV market shares above 85%, demonstrating what’s possible when a country fully embraces the transition. Other European nations are following suit, though not quite as dramatically (yet).
I’ve consistently called out the International Energy Agency (IEA) for their persistently conservative forecasts. Their 2020 outlook projected just 23 million EVs on the road by 2030 under existing policies, or 43 million under a more aggressive scenario. We’re now on track to blow past both of those figures by 2025 — in fact, set to double their “aggressive” scenario — five years early! This major miss continues the IEA’s pattern of significantly underestimating the growth of transformative clean energy technologies, just as they have done with solar power for decades now.
Figure 1. My rough forecast for global EV sales, based on growth data from the last few years. By 2030 we could have about 360 million EVs on the road, with 2/3 of those being fully electric.
Even the U.S. market, a bit of a laggard compared to China and EU, has seen particularly encouraging growth. President Biden’s non-binding goal of 50% EV sales by 2030, which seemed fairly ambitious when announced in 2021, now looks quite achievable and perhaps even conservative. GM and Ford’s commitments to either all-zero-emission vehicles by 2035 (GM) or all-electric European sales by 2030 (Ford) are helping drive this transition.
BYD, a Chinese company, and Tesla, a US company, continue to dominate global EV sales. Tesla surpassed 1 million annual vehicle sales in 2021 and continuing strong growth since then, almost doubling to 1.8 million vehicles sold in both 2023 and 2024. Astoundingly, the Tesla Model Y was not only the best-selling EV in the world in 2023 but the best-selling car, period. It got edged out of the top spot in 2024 (barely) by the Toyota Corolla. It’s easy to hate on Elon for many reasons (yes, he’s been getting increasingly erratic), but the guy deserves major kudos for these achievements. He has been a massive factor in global acceptance of EVs.
But traditional automakers are finally getting serious about EVs, with dozens of compelling models now available across all vehicle segments. The competition is helping drive innovation and bringing prices down further.
Battery costs have continued their steady decline, dropping to about $111/kWh by the end of 2024 — the point at which EVs reach price parity with internal combustion vehicles. This is driving what I previously termed the “EV singularity” — the point at which EVs become so cheap and appealing that they become the default choice for most new vehicle purchases. We’re seeing this play out first in leading markets like Norway, but the trend is clearly spreading globally.
The virtuous cycle I’ve long discussed continues: as battery costs fall, EV sales increase, which drives further battery cost reductions through economies of scale and learning curve improvements. The “Kammen curve” of battery cost declines (about 17% cost reduction for each doubling of production) remains remarkably consistent.
Looking ahead, I remain highly optimistic about EV growth prospects. The combination of falling prices, improving technology, expanding charging infrastructure, and strengthening policy support creates powerful momentum. While we may see occasional slowdowns or bumps in the road (Pres-Elect Trump has vowed to rollback EV incentives for the US), the overall trajectory is clear: EVs are the future of transportation.
We’re still in the early stages of the S-curve of adoption, moving from early adopters to the early majority. But the pace of change is accelerating. Just as we saw with solar power, once a technology becomes clearly superior in both economics and performance, the transition can happen much faster than most people expect. How vertical will the growth curve be? Hard to say, given so many factors at play, but my best guess is that we will see EV growth accelerate in the next few years globally, rather than slowing down.
The “braid” of clean energy revolutions I’ve written about — solar, batteries, EVs, and autonomous vehicles — continues to strengthen as these technologies develop and interact. Electric autonomous vehicles, for instance, are likely to accelerate EV adoption through robotaxi fleets (with Tesla’s “robotaxi” perhaps leading the charge as it comes to market in 2025 and 2026), while growing EV adoption drives battery technology improvements that benefit stationary storage for renewable energy.
While challenges remain, particularly around charging infrastructure and supply chains, the EV revolution appears unstoppable at this point. The only real question is how quickly we’ll reach the tipping point of mass adoption in different markets. Based on current trends, it seems likely that EVs will comprise the majority of new vehicle sales in most major markets by 2030, setting us up for a predominantly electric vehicle fleet by 2040–2045.
The future is indeed bright for clean transportation. The revolution is here, and it’s accelerating faster than even many optimists expected.
[AI disclosure: I had help from Claude 3.5 in writing this update]
