High petrol prices are driving EV sales around the world, with the leading international authority predicting 30 per cent of all new cars sold this year will be electric.
EVs accounted for a quarter of global sales in 2025 and EV sales set new records in almost 100 countries including Australia, the latest edition of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) annual Global Outlook report states.
The global comparison shows Australia’s EV uptake (15 per cent of new car sales in 2025) has accelerated past the US and Canada in recent years, but fallen behind other countries
The share of EV sales in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand saw 80 per cent year-on-year growth in the first quarter of 2026 as the US war with Iran drove up petrol prices in late February and pushed consumers towards more affordable transport options.
The other main driver of growth was the increasing availability of affordable Chinese-made EVs, the IEA’s Alessandro Blasi said.
China accounted for 75 per cent of all EVs produced in 2025. Like in Australia, Chinese brands have come to dominate the EV market in many countries.
“The development that we are seeing in global car markets is actually truly staggering,” Mr Blasi said.
“Chinese Imports now account for over half of electric car sales in countries outside Europe and the United States.”
How China’s EV industry sped away from the US’s
China’s dominance of global EVs was partly due to its innovation in battery technology and manufacturing, IEA technology analyst Araceli Fernandez Pales said.
“Today the price of batteries in China is lower than in any part of the world, but this wasn’t always the case.“
Eight years ago, the prices of batteries in China and the US were about equal, with US companies including Tesla and Panasonic pushing the boundaries of energy densities and economies of scale.
The Chinese government invested heavily in the battery industry.
“Since then, we’ve begun to see that the pathways have begun to diverge as EV battery manufacturing in China scaled on the back of growing domestic demand,” Ms Fernandez Pales said.
“By 2025, China has produced cumulatively eight times as many batteries as the US, and the result is that the average price of batteries in China is about 30 per cent lower than in the US.”
China accounts for 80 per cent of battery cell production and even higher shares of production of the active materials in EV batteries.
Economies of scale and low-cost battery designs has led to cheaper EVs with longer range and shorter charge times.
In 2020, the maximum charging power of any EV model was 250kW. It’s now 1,000kW, which allows vehicles to add up to 400km of range in five minutes.
Chinese manufacturers are driving growth in EV market share across South-East Asian and Latin American markets. (Reuters: Chalinee Thirasupa)
Battery technology has become an important field of innovation.
Patents related to lithium-ion batteries represent almost half of all energy-related patents and China dominates the list, Ms Fernandez Pales said.
“No other energy technology has ever commanded such a high share in global energy patents.”
US pulls back from EV transition
Global sales of conventional internal combustion engine vehicles peaked in 2017, according to the IEA, which predicts EVs may account for 50 per cent of global sales by 2035.
“The recovery of the global car market since the pandemic has been exclusively driven by sales of hybrid and electric cars,” Ms Fernandez Pales said.
But the US is pulling back from the EV transition as the rest of the world is accelerating.
EV sales growth in the US declined year-on-year in the first quarter of 2026 as policies to drive uptake were wound back and US car makers halted production of some EV models.
In Europe, sales increased by close to 30 per cent year-on-year; in the Asia Pacific region excluding China, sales jumped by 80 per cent; and in Latin America, they were up by 75 per cent.
The IEA report states:
“Even without any new policy announcements, the global fleet of EVs is projected to grow more than sixfold by 2035 from 2025 levels, to reach as many as 510 million.”
The peak body for the industry in Australia, the EV Council (EVC), said battery electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles accounted for a quarter of sales over the past two months, mirroring this international growth.
EV sales in Australia were up 65 per cent year-on year in the first quarter of 2026.
“With surging petrol prices and geopolitical uncertainty, people around the world are making the sensible decision to step into EVs,” head of policy Aman Gaur said.
