Have Petrol Car Sales Peaked? World and China, 2010-2025

The IEA puts it in 2017. Its Global EV Outlook 2026 says that in its exploratory scenarios sales of conventional cars "never return to their 2017 peak". Our World in Data, which publishes the series this page draws on, also dates the peak to 2017 and notes that Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimated it around the same time. GlobalData, using a wider count of all light vehicles, likewise puts the market's peak at 95 million in 2017.

In the series built for this page, 2017 is the highest year, at about 85 million non-electric cars against about 62 million in 2010. The rounding behind the series means 2016, 2017 and 2018, at about 81, 85 and 83 million, cannot be separated with confidence from these figures alone. The IEA's date rests on its own unrounded data.

Total new car sales, electric and non-electric together, were also at their highest in 2017, at about 86 million.

Yes, by an estimated quarter, but not in a straight line. The series falls from about 85 million in 2017 to about 64 million in 2025, most of it in two steps: about 10% in 2019 and about 14% in 2020.

The 2019 fall came before the pandemic. ACEA, counting passenger car registrations from IHS Markit data on a different basis, reports a world fall of 4.9% that year, to 74.9 million. Both measures fell. The series used here shows a larger drop, and we found no source that explains the size of the difference.

The sources do show where the 2019 fall was. ACEA reports China down 8.9%. The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers named the transformation of the industry, trade frictions with the United States, changes in environmental protection standards and cuts to electric car subsidies, and Reuters reported that cities and provinces covering over 60% of China's car sales brought in new emission standards early, which unsettled buyers. ACEA reports India down 11.3%, mainly because of rising ownership costs and tighter consumer credit after problems in the financial sector, and the United States down 3.2%. Europe was up 0.4%.

The pandemic then took a larger bite: the IEA puts the 2020 fall in world car registrations at 16%, with China down about 9% and Europe about 22%.

The series reaches its low in 2022, at about 58 million, and rebounds about 14% by 2024. GlobalData says the global light vehicle market recovered about 10% in 2023 as supply shortages eased and carmakers worked through order backlogs. S&P Global Mobility estimates that over 9.5 million units of light-vehicle production were lost to the semiconductor shortage in 2021 and another 3 million in 2022. The IEA reports that China's conventional car sales fell 8% in 2023, so the rebound came from outside China. The series edges lower in 2025, a change small enough to sit within its rounding, and three years after the low is too short a run to say whether that is a new decline or a pause.

China is about half of the fall, not all of it. Its non-electric sales, estimated from the same IEA series, fell from about 24 million in 2017 to about 12 million in 2025, a drop of about half. That is about 12 million of the world's roughly 21 million fall.

The rest of the world fell too, by about 15%, from about 61 million to about 52 million. Europe's non-electric sales fell by roughly a third over the same years.

China's own car market did not shrink. Its total sales were about 24 million in 2017 and 25 million in 2025, while the electric share went from 2.4% to 53%. China bought 63% of the world's electric cars in 2025. The IEA reports that Chinese automakers supplied 60% of global electric car sales and that 70% of the battery-electric cars sold in China in 2025 were already cheaper than the average conventional car; in the small car segment it says electric cars have largely displaced conventional ones.

Policy shaped 2025 too. China's trade-in scheme, launched in April 2024 and renewed in 2025, offered 20,000 yuan for replacing an old vehicle with a new electric car and 15,000 yuan for a new conventional one. The IEA says it was temporarily halted in several cities in July 2025 over limited provincial funding and reports of zero-mileage cars, and electric sales dipped 10% from June. The China Passenger Car Association reported conventional fuel passenger car retail of 10.94 million in 2025, down 9%, on a retail basis that differs from the series used here.

Not by much. On the series' estimates, total sales were about 86 million in 2017 and about 85 million in 2025, within rounding of each other. Over the same years electric sales rose 20 million, from 1.2 million to 21.2 million, and non-electric sales fell about 21 million. That is close to one for one.

The total did dip along the way, to about 68 million in 2020 and again in 2022, before recovering. The market after 2017 is about the same size as before, with a different mix of drivetrains.

The IEA's data show 21.2 million electric cars sold worldwide in 2025, up from 17.5 million in 2024 and 1.2 million in 2017. The IEA's own summary says electric sales grew by 20% to exceed 20 million, one quarter of all new cars sold. In 2017 the share was 1.4%.

The shares differ widely by market. The IEA reports electric cars at 28% of new car sales in Europe in 2025 and under 10% in the United States, and says more than 100 countries recorded growth in electric sales. China's 13.3 million electric cars were 63% of the world total.

The IEA's figures for the years ahead are scenarios, not forecasts. In its exploratory scenarios the share of conventional cars shrinks in every case and their sales never return to the 2017 level, and electric cars reach around 50% of world sales in 2035.

For 2026 the IEA expects electric car sales of 23 million, 28% of the total. It says the current high oil price, which it links to the conflict in the Middle East, is drawing attention to the lower running costs of electric cars, and that the conflict's wider economic effects might temper overall car sales. It also reports that electric sales in the first quarter of 2026 were 8% lower than a year earlier, mainly in China and the United States after policy changes, including China cutting its electric car purchase tax exemption to 50% from January. The data on this page end in 2025 and extend none of these projections.

The figures are the IEA's Global EV Outlook 2026 series of new cars sold, as published by Our World in Data, covering 2010 to 2025. The IEA publishes electric sales and the electric share of sales, each rounded. Our World in Data divides one by the other to get total sales and subtracts electric sales to get non-electric. Because the shares are rounded, those results can be off by a few percent, which is why we show them to the nearest million, say "about" and "an estimated", and do not rely on year-to-year differences smaller than that.

The IEA's own data download needs an account and carries different terms from the CC BY 4.0 licence stated on its report pages, so we cite the report and read the figures from Our World in Data's copy, which cites the same licence. The rest-of-world figure is the world estimate minus China, calculated by FactsFigs. The data do not split petrol, diesel and conventional hybrid cars, so every statement about "petrol" cars here means the wider non-electric group. Statements about causes are attributed to the organisation that made them and use those sources' own bases, which differ from the series used here.