RESEARCH
Global EV Share of New Car Sales for 2025 Splits 16.1% to 26% Across Analyst Trackers
Four widely cited trackers each published a full-year 2025 figure for global EV share of new passenger car sales, and the values split into two clusters roughly 9-10 percentage points apart depending on definition. IEA (25%) and BloombergNEF (about 26%) count battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) plus plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) together, as does EV-Volumes.com, whose combined figure also lands at 26%. But EV-Volumes' own BEV-only breakdown is 17%, and S&P Global Mobility, reporting a BEV-only figure, puts the actual 2025 share at 16.1%. Running these figures through UVRN's Delta Engine surfaces the disagreement rather than forcing a single consensus number.
Findings
- IEA's Global EV Outlook puts 2025 global EV share of new car sales at 25%, counting BEVs and PHEVs together -- the first time the combined figure passed a quarter of all new cars sold worldwide.
- BloombergNEF's Electric Vehicle Outlook 2025 independently arrives at a similar combined figure, describing roughly one in four cars sold globally in 2025 as either a BEV or a PHEV.
- EV-Volumes.com's full-year 2025 tracking shows the same 26% combined BEV+PHEV share, but its own BEV-only breakdown is just 17% -- a 9-point gap from its own combined number, illustrating how much of the higher figures depends on including plug-in hybrids.
- S&P Global Mobility's January 2026 report on actual full-year 2025 results puts battery-electric vehicles alone at 16.1% of global light vehicle sales (14.6 million units, up 29% year over year) -- the lowest of the four figures and the only one reported without a PHEV add-on.
- The four trackers' figures span 16.1% to 26% -- a 9.9 percentage-point gap -- despite all four nominally measuring 2025 global EV adoption; the split tracks almost exactly with whether plug-in hybrids are counted.
Delta Engine result
↔ Divergence Detected — Δ 0.3313 (threshold 0.05)
Evidence quality
avg 53.8 · min 25 · max 95 · spread 70