For the first time in history, electric vehicles made up one in every 10 new cars sold worldwide — a milestone that would have seemed ambitious just five years earlier. Research from LMC Automotive and EV-Volumes.com confirmed that roughly 7.8 million fully electric vehicles were sold globally in 2022 C.E., even as the overall car market shrank.
The numbers
- Global EV sales: Roughly 7.8 million fully electric vehicles were sold worldwide in 2022 C.E., a 68% jump over 2021 C.E. figures.
- EV market share: Electric vehicles reached 10% of all new car sales globally — the first time the segment has crossed that threshold.
- China’s dominance: China alone accounted for around 5 million of those sales, with EVs making up 19% of all new vehicles sold there.
A surge that defied the broader market
What makes the growth especially striking is the context in which it happened. Overall new car sales fell by roughly 1% in 2022 C.E., weighed down by supply chain disruptions tied in part to the war in Ukraine. EV sales, by contrast, surged 68% year over year.
Ford, Mercedes-Benz, and BMW each saw their EV sales roughly double, even as their total vehicle sales declined. That gap between EV growth and overall market decline suggests the shift in consumer demand is structural, not cyclical.
Europe sold around 1.5 million fully electric vehicles, representing 11% of its new car market. That reflects years of tightening emissions regulations and national commitments to phase out internal combustion engines — with several E.U. member states setting hard deadlines for banning new petrol and diesel car sales.
Where the U.S. stands
The United States trailed both China and Europe, with fully electric vehicles making up just under 6% of new car sales in 2022 C.E. That put the country significantly behind its peers. But it also nearly doubled the U.S. EV share from 2021 C.E., signaling real momentum.
Tesla dominated the American market, accounting for roughly 65% of U.S. EV sales that year. That concentration in a single brand points to both Tesla’s early lead and the gap that other automakers are still working to close in the American market.
Why this milestone matters
The 10% threshold is more than a symbolic number. In technology adoption, market share in the low double digits often marks the point at which a new technology stops being a niche product and begins reshaping the broader industry. Charging infrastructure, battery supply chains, and resale markets all start to scale differently once a technology reaches this level of penetration.
Governments have accelerated this by legislating certainty. When automakers know that new petrol car sales will be banned in major markets by a specific year, they invest accordingly. The International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook has tracked how policy certainty correlates directly with manufacturing investment and sales growth.
The BloombergNEF analysis of the same period noted that when plug-in hybrids are included alongside fully electric vehicles, the combined share of electrified new car sales reached roughly 14% globally — a figure that would have been almost unimaginable a decade earlier.
Battery costs have been central to this shift. The BloombergNEF Electric Vehicle Outlook has documented how lithium-ion battery pack prices fell by around 90% between 2010 C.E. and 2022 C.E., a drop that has steadily narrowed the price gap between EVs and their petrol equivalents.
Gaps that remain
The transition is not evenly distributed. China’s 19% EV market share and Europe’s 11% stand in sharp contrast to parts of the Global South, where EV adoption remains minimal. Charging infrastructure is sparse across much of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, and the upfront cost of EVs remains a barrier in lower-income markets even where interest is high. The World Bank has flagged this equity gap as one of the central challenges of a just energy transition — ensuring that cleaner mobility reaches communities that have historically had the least access to it.
Grid emissions matter too. An EV is only as clean as the electricity that charges it, which means the climate benefit varies significantly depending on whether a country’s power supply comes from renewables or coal.
Still, 2022 C.E. marked a genuine turning point. The internal combustion engine dominated personal transport for over a century. Reaching 10% electric in a single year — while the broader market contracted — suggests that dominance is now, credibly, in question.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Only Good News Daily
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Indigenous land rights recognition reaches 160 million hectares ahead of COP30
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- The Good News for Humankind archive on clean energy
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