According to the International Energy Agency, China and Europe will lead in electric car sales in 2021. China sold 3.4 million electric cars in 2021, more than any other market. The Chinese government aims to increase the market share of electric cars to 20% by 2025. This sounds like a very optimistic plan, but the current numbers show that China is well on its way. In addition, subsidies will continue to flow into the market, as the Chinese government has just extended the subsidies for electric cars by 2 years.
Europe is second only to China in terms of the number of electric cars sold in 2021, with sales increasing by almost 70% to 2.3 million vehicles. However, only about half of these were all-electric cars. It’s likely that Europeans aren’t quite convinced about the technology yet, as the other half of the 2.3 million coming from plug-in hybrids. In addition, sales growth was slower than in 2020, likely due to the fact that Europe has not yet recovered from the COVID pandemic. The country in Europe where the most electric cars were sold was Germany. Every third car sold in Germany between November and December was an electric car.
The U.S. continues to lag behind in electric car sales. Although electric car sales have doubled, only about 0.5 million electric cars were sold in 2021. The electric car market share in the U.S. is currently 2.5%, even though the world’s largest electric car manufacturer, Tesla, is from the U.S. Tesla not only dominates the global market but also in the U.S., where more than half of all electric cars sold are Teslas.
China, Europe, and the U.S. together account for 90% of the global market share for electric vehicles. This also shows that the rest of the world is completely behind. This includes not only developing countries but also industrialized countries such as Japan, where the market share is less than 1%. In Korea, the situation looks somewhat better with an 8% market share for electric cars. In Australia, electric cars have a market share of over 2%.
Top 5 electric car producers by sales in 2021
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) with 936,000 cars sold.
VW Group (XETRA: VOW3.DE) with 763,000 cars sold.
BYD (HKSE: 1211.HK) with 598,000 cars sold.
GM (NYSE: GM) with 517,000 cars sold.
Stellantis (NYSE: STLA) with 385,000 cars sold.