Note: This is an imagined future story, written as if a projected milestone has occurred. It is based on current trends and evidence, not confirmed events.
For the first time in history, more than half of all new passenger cars sold worldwide in 2034 C.E. are electric — a threshold that seemed distant just a decade ago, when EVs accounted for barely one in 25 vehicles on the road. The milestone, long projected by the International Energy Agency and Goldman Sachs Research, has now arrived one year ahead of the most-cited forecast.
Key projections that got us here
- Global EV market share: EVs rose from 25% of new car sales in 2025 C.E. to just over 51% in 2034 C.E., driven by battery cost collapse, tighter emissions standards, and surging adoption across emerging markets.
- Battery cost decline: The average cost of an EV battery pack has fallen more than 60% since 2025 C.E., making electric cars cheaper to buy — not just to operate — in most major markets worldwide.
- Emerging market growth: Asia Pacific (excluding China), Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa together now account for nearly a third of global EV sales, up from single digits in the mid-2020s.
The foundation built in the 2020s
The path to 2034 C.E. was laid by a wave of acceleration in the late 2020s that few outside the EV industry fully anticipated. In 2025 C.E., global electric car sales surpassed 20 million units — the first year EVs broke the one-quarter threshold of all new car sales worldwide. That was itself a sixfold increase from just 4% of sales in 2020 C.E.
China led the way. In 2025 C.E., more than 13 million electric cars were sold there, and monthly EV sales exceeded a 50% market share in 11 out of 12 months of that year. By early 2026 C.E., preliminary data showed China’s monthly EV share crossing 60%. In China’s small-car segment, electric vehicles had already largely displaced conventional cars — and 70% of battery electric cars sold there in 2025 C.E. were already cheaper than the average gasoline vehicle.
Europe followed with its own surge. Electric car sales across the continent rose more than 30% in 2025 C.E., reaching 28% of all new cars sold. Germany’s EV sales jumped 50% in a single year. Norway closed 2025 C.E. at a 95.9% battery-electric share of new passenger cars. These were not outliers — they were signals of what broader markets would do once the economics aligned.
The emerging-market surprise
The storyline of the 2030s has not been China or Europe. It has been everywhere else.
Vietnam reached a 40% EV passenger car sales share in the first half of 2025 C.E. — up from near zero just five years earlier. Thailand hit 28%. By the early 2030s, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa were recording EV growth rates that outpaced anything the Western world managed in the transition’s early years.
This mattered enormously for the global total. The IEA’s 2026 C.E. data showed that roughly 60% of EV sales growth globally was already originating outside the traditional trio of China, Europe, and the United States. As one of many clean energy transitions now reshaping the global economy, the EV shift has proven most dynamic at its edges — in cities and markets that conventional forecasters consistently underestimated.
By 2034 C.E., the IEA projects the global fleet of EVs will have grown more than sixfold from 2025 C.E. levels, reaching as many as 510 million vehicles on the road worldwide. The fleet number lags the sales number — most gasoline cars already sold will remain in use for years — but the direction is unmistakable.
What actually changed
Three forces converged to make 2034 C.E. the year the majority line was crossed.
First, battery costs. Goldman Sachs Research projected in the mid-2020s that global EV battery prices could drop by nearly 50% by 2026 C.E. That forecast proved roughly accurate — and the decline continued through the decade, making EVs cheaper to purchase outright across more and more market segments and income levels.
Second, regulation. The EU’s tightening CO2 standards for cars pushed automakers to accelerate electrification faster than they might have chosen on economics alone. Similar standards spread to markets across Asia and Latin America through the late 2020s, creating a regulatory floor that ICE manufacturers could no longer ignore.
Third, the infrastructure flywheel. As IEA’s Global EV Outlook documented through successive editions, EV charging networks expanded fastest where EV adoption was already highest — which then accelerated adoption further. Public charging availability, once cited as the leading barrier to purchase, has ceased to be a meaningful obstacle in most urban markets worldwide.
The Goldman Sachs projection from the mid-2020s placed the majority milestone at 2035 C.E. — but the combination of accelerating emerging-market adoption, faster-than-expected battery cost declines, and stricter global emissions standards has moved the date forward by roughly a year.
What the milestone does not yet solve
Crossing 50% of new car sales is not the same as transforming the global fleet. The world’s roughly 1.4 billion registered vehicles are not replaced overnight.
Gasoline and diesel cars sold in the 2020s will remain on roads for 10 to 15 years — meaning full fleet electrification is still a 2040s-and-beyond story. The IEA projects EVs will exceed 80% of global new car sales by 2040 C.E., but fleet-wide emissions from transport will continue well past that date. Access also remains uneven: rural regions and lower-income populations in many markets still face higher upfront costs and thinner charging infrastructure than urban centers. And the clean energy that must power this fleet — along with the land and communities involved in supplying battery minerals — raises its own unresolved questions about equity and stewardship.
The majority milestone matters. It signals that the energy transition in road transport is no longer a forecast — it is a trajectory. But the work of making that trajectory genuinely clean and genuinely fair is still underway.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Goldman Sachs — Electric vehicles are forecast to be half of global car sales by 2035
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Renewables now make up at least 49% of global power capacity
- Indigenous land rights and COP30: 160 million hectares
- The Good News for Humankind archive on clean energy
About this article
- 🤖 This article is AI-generated, based on a framework created by Peter Schulte.
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