Sometime in 2025, roughly half of every new passenger car sold in China was electric or plug-in hybrid. That milestone, once projected for the end of the decade, arrived years ahead of schedule. Across the continent, the European Union has written into binding law that every new car sold after 2035 must produce zero tailpipe emissions. Together, these two markets accounted for about 85% of all electric cars sold worldwide in 2023, according to the IEA’s Global EV Outlook 2024. The combustion engine is not dying everywhere at the same speed, but in the two largest arenas where cars are bought and sold, the data now points in only one direction.
China crossed the 50% line
China’s new-energy vehicle market has followed what technology-adoption researchers call an S-curve: years of slow, subsidy-dependent growth followed by a sharp inflection once prices, charging infrastructure, and consumer confidence aligned. The country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology oversaw an industry roadmap targeting approximately 50% NEV market share for new passenger cars by 2025. The IEA’s outlook for electric mobility tracked that target and projected China’s NEV share could reach up to 45% in 2024 under baseline estimates. Time-series data from the IEA’s Global EV Data Explorer shows the trajectory steepening year over year.
By the IEA’s 2025 summary, the picture had sharpened further: China accounted for about 60% of all global electric-car sales in 2023, and domestic competition among BYD, Geely, and dozens of smaller manufacturers had pushed average EV prices below those of comparable gasoline models in several vehicle segments. That price crossover is significant because it removes the last major barrier to mass adoption. Once electric cars are simply cheaper, the shift becomes self-reinforcing.
A caveat: the enforcement mechanisms behind China’s 50% target remain difficult to verify in publicly available English-language documentation. The IEA cites the MIIT-supervised roadmap, but primary regulatory text detailing penalties, credit-trading rules, or compliance timelines has not been independently confirmed in the sources used here. Whether the 50% figure functions as a binding mandate or an industry consensus goal matters for how durable this shift proves to be. Still, the sales data itself is unambiguous. Chinese consumers are buying electric cars at a pace that no policy reversal could quickly undo.
Europe’s legal lock
Europe’s EV transition is moving more slowly than China’s, but it is anchored by something China’s is not: binding legislation with the force of treaty-backed law. Regulation (EU) 2023/851, published in the Official Journal of the European Union, amends earlier CO2 fleet standards and sets a 100% emissions-reduction target for new cars and vans from 2035. Under that framework, every new vehicle sold in the bloc must be zero-emission. Changing the target would require a full legislative process involving both the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, a procedural hurdle that makes casual rollback unlikely even if political winds shift.
The near-term numbers are more complicated. The EU registered approximately 1.45 million new battery-only electric passenger cars in 2024, with the BEV share settling at about 13.6% of all new registrations, down slightly from 14.6% in 2023, according to Eurostat. That dip grabbed headlines, but it needs context. The European Environment Agency’s registration tracker shows that EVs already exceed 50% of new registrations in some EU member states, and the EU-27 structural floor remains far above pre-2020 levels even after the 2024 softening.
Part of the confusion around Europe’s EV share stems from how different organizations count. Eurostat’s 13.6% covers battery-electric vehicles only. The IEA, which includes plug-in hybrids alongside BEVs, pegged Europe’s 2024 share at around 20% in its Global EV Outlook 2025. An earlier IEA projection had estimated roughly 25% for 2024. These figures are complementary, not contradictory, but they mean that “Europe’s EV share” is not a single settled number. Readers should note which vehicle types are included before comparing across sources.
What the tipping-point argument actually means
The word “tipping point” gets used loosely, so it is worth being precise. In technology-adoption research, a tipping point is the threshold beyond which a new technology’s growth becomes self-sustaining: network effects, falling costs, expanding infrastructure, and shifting consumer expectations all reinforce each other, making reversion to the old technology progressively harder. For EVs, analysts have generally placed that threshold somewhere between 5% and 15% of new-car sales, depending on the market. China blew past it years ago. Most of Western Europe is now well above it.
That does not mean every country is on the same clock. The United States, where EV policy has been more politically contested and where pickup trucks and SUVs dominate sales, sits on a different trajectory. Nor does it mean the transition will be painless. No direct official statements from European manufacturers on the financial burden of meeting the 2035 standard appear in available institutional data, and the absence of upstream battery supply-chain records from either Chinese or EU governments limits the ability to quantify the raw-material commitments underpinning the shift. Cobalt, lithium, and nickel supply chains remain concentrated and vulnerable to disruption.
But the structural argument does not depend on every quarter being a record quarter. It depends on whether the combination of law, industrial capacity, consumer behavior, and cost curves has moved past the point where a return to majority-combustion sales is plausible. In China, where domestic automakers have built massive EV production capacity and consumers have responded, the answer as of mid-2026 is clearly yes. In Europe, where the legal architecture is locked in and the charging network is expanding, the answer is the same, with the asterisk that political pressure from some member states and automaker lobbies to soften the 2035 deadline remains a live issue.
Where the pressure lands next
The practical consequences of this shift are already visible. Global oil demand for passenger transport, the single largest source of petroleum consumption, faces structural decline for the first time if EV adoption in China and Europe continues on its current path. Automakers that delayed electrification are now scrambling to catch up, while those that moved early, particularly Chinese manufacturers, are expanding into Southeast Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa.
For consumers in markets where the transition is well underway, the calculus is straightforward: resale values for combustion vehicles will erode as the pool of future buyers shrinks, and the charging and service infrastructure for EVs will only improve as scale increases. For policymakers elsewhere, the data from China and Europe offers a blunt lesson. Once EV adoption crosses certain thresholds, the question stops being whether to transition and becomes how fast to manage it.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
