In this post, I mentioned that I was busy improving my global car sales data. I've taken a few steps down that road, but I still have a lot of work to do. To start with, I used data from OICA and Best Selling Cars, but there were plenty of gaps, and I had to estimate some values. I also added data for all countries where annual car sales exceeded 200,000 units on average for the last 4 years. My total global car sales do not include countries with annual sales below 200K per annum. I estimate that these total about 1.8 million cars (using OICA's data) or about 2.5% of global car sales.
My data cover the EU, EFTA, UK, USA, Russia, China, Japan, India, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Australia, Indonesia, Israel, Malaysia, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam and South Africa. I will be improving and deepening these time series over the next few months, allowing me to fill in some gaps, and possibly adding countries where car sales are 100K per annum.
The first chart shows global sales of EVs, smoothed and seasonally adjusted, quarterly, as a percentage of global car sales, smoothed. Notice the classic S-curve shape. In Q1/2014, EVs made up just 0.45% of global car sales. They didn't pass 1% until Q1/2016. They didn't pass 3% until Q3/2018. Then came China's big cut to EV-buying incentives, as well as Covid. 2 years were lost as the line curved down. But then the percentage exceeded 5% in Q4/2020, and it's not looked back since. In Q2/2022, EVs made up 13% of global car sales, in Q2/2023, 19.4%. This is a classic S-curve. For a long time, no one really notices the rise, but then suddenly, once it passes 5% penetration, it explodes. At this growth rate, EVs will make up 30% of car sales by mid-2024, 45% by mid 2025 and 70% by mid-2026.
OK, this is what the data look like using a log scale. Notice that they form a straight line, except for the China-removing-incentives/Covid period. The growth rate has slipped a bit in recent quarters---you can see that from the slightly flatter line---but part of that is ICEV supply chain difficulties improving (this is a relative chart).
China is now a major exporter of cars, in fact the largest exporter of cars in the world. One third of these are EVs, another ~10% PHEVs. Sleepy legacy car manufacturers have only just noticed that their market will disappear within 5 years, and are now agitating for protection from imports, so this may flatten the curve, as China is by far the cheapest EV producer in the world today, and sells a lot into the European market, which subsidises EVs no matter where they are produced. The US taxes EV imports and only subsidises locally-made EVs.
By the end of this year, petrol (gasoline) sales will be falling by 2% per annum, as a result of the expansion of EV/PHEV sales. By 2026 they'll be falling by ~5% per annum; by 2028 by ~10% per annum. This alone will be cutting total global emissions, ceteris paribus, by 2% a year (20% of global CO2 emissions come from land transport). Expect a last convulsive gasp of special pleading from oil companies and legacy carmakers as that happens. But it's hard to see how this revolution will be stopped. Battery costs keep on falling, and the pressure to cut emissions keeps on rising.
Frankly, it will be a pleasure not to have to kowtow to bloodstained petro states any more, and to breathe clean air.
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