U.S. EV growth has definitely been slowing lately, but globally plug-in sales are still climbing fast. At first glance, that feels a bit contradictory—like the whole market should be moving in the same direction.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), more than 20 million electric vehicles were sold worldwide in 2025, making up about a quarter of all new car sales globally.
So if global demand is still strong, why does the U.S. look like it’s cooling off?
It doesn’t really seem like one single global “EV trend” anymore. It looks more like different regions are just at very different stages.
In the U.S., a big part of it feels like affordability and timing. EVs are still often more expensive upfront than comparable gas cars, and higher interest rates don’t help when you’re financing a vehicle. On top of that, people are holding onto cars longer than they used to—the average vehicle age is now around 13 years. That alone slows down how fast people cycle into new EVs.
China is basically the opposite story. It sold more than 13 million EVs in 2025, around 60% of global EV sales and roughly 55% of new car sales. The main difference there seems to be how competitive the market is. A lot of domestic brands are fighting hard on price and volume, so EVs aren’t really “premium” products anymore—they’re just the default cheap option in a lot of cases.
Europe is somewhere in between, but it feels more stable in terms of direction. After a weaker 2024, EV sales bounced back by about 30% in 2025 to over 4 million units. Even when policies shift a bit, the long-term direction still seems pretty locked in, which probably helps manufacturers plan ahead.
Emerging markets are interesting too, even if they’re still small in total numbers. EV sales there jumped nearly 80% in 2025 to around 1.2 million units. A lot of that growth seems to come from cheaper EVs becoming available earlier in those markets than people expected.
Put together, it kind of stops looking like one global EV transition and more like several regional ones happening at different speeds.
So maybe the real story isn’t that EV growth is slowing or not—it’s that we’re no longer looking at one single curve. We’re looking at a bunch of different ones depending on the region.