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December was a Record Month!
There were over 2.1 million plugin vehicles registered in December, with both BEVs (+13% YoY) and PHEVs (+6% YoY) rising.
With the USA EV market still in hangover mode and China slowing down, it was up to the Rest of the World (+51% YoY) to pick up the pace, pulling plugins to a 10% growth rate in November.
There were over 2.1 million registrations, beating the previous record set last September by a small margin. BEVs grew 13% YoY to 1.4 million units, while plugin hybrids this time were up by 6% to around 750,000 units.
Counting the total amount for 2025, over 20 million plugin units were sold, a sizable increase over the 17 million of 2024. At this pace, plugins will be the majority of global sales in fewer than 10 years.
In the end, in December, BEVs represented 21% share of the overall auto market (and plugins represented 32% if we add PHEVs to the tally), pulling the full 2025 numbers to 17% BEV share (26% PHEV+BEV).
With robust share growth (22% PEV share in 2024 and 26% now), the momentum behind the EV Revolution has become unstoppable, despite many attempts to sabotage it.
Also, taking into consideration that plugless hybrids (HEVs) represented 13% of the total market in 2025, one can say that 39% of all cars sold in 2025 globally already had some form of electrification. We can expect that the vast majority of new cars will have some kind of electrification by around 2035.
Looking at the main markets, while North America had a bad year in 2025, with its plugin sales dropping 6% YoY, China grew moderately (13%) at the same time, but with plugin share already above 50%, one would expect that.
Europe (30%+) and the Rest of the World (50%+), on the other hand, increased their growth rate in 2025, so expect these regions to increase their weight on the total sales rankings.
That was already visible in 2025, as the weight of the Chinese market on overall sales decreased from a mammoth 64% in 2024 to a slightly less mammoth 62%.
Out of the top 5 automotive markets (China, USA, India, Japan, and Germany), Japan and India are still the laggards, but the two have different dynamics. While the Japanese market is still stagnating in plugless hybrid wonderland, India has kickstarted its EV Revolution, with its EV domestic market jumping 92% in 2025. That allowed India to reach 4% EV share by the end of the year.
But it wasn’t only India registering outstanding growth. Other large markets — like Indonesia (+128%), Vietnam (+97%), Turkey (+90%), and Mexico (+154%) — have seen their markets surge, pulling EV sales upwards.
Share-wise, 39 countries this year had electric vehicles getting 10% or more of their auto markets in 2025, remarkable progress when we remember that in 2019 only four countries had reached that goal. And to think that in that same year (2019) we were celebrating the fact that the global EV share had gone from 2% (in 2018) to 3%. 2025 ended with 26% EV share!
The EV share highlights among less media-friendly markets were Nepal (50%+ share), Vietnam (close to 40% EV share), Singapore (40%+), Thailand (surpassed the 20% mark in 2025), and Indonesia (now at 15% share).
But it’s not only in ASEAN countries that the EV Revolution is gaining pace. In Latin America, Uruguay is a frontrunner, with 27% EV share, surpassing the local EV darling Costa Rica, which “only” registered 17% share in 2025.
One of the big drivers for growth in these markets, like we have seen previously in the Albania and Ukraine articles we published, is that the Chinese started to export their EV models en masse, stealing sales from the big legacy players in those markets who are still pushing ICE vehicles. That meant Japanese OEMs in Asia, and European and American OEMs in Latin America.
The world is changing, wether people like it or not, and electrification is not stopping, despite what some “freedom lovers” say in the media.
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