Electric vehicles reached twenty-five percent of global new-car sales in 2025, and a recent paper in Nature Communications argues that the world has crossed what researchers call a tipping point — the moment a trend becomes self-sustaining and stops needing a push from governments. Sales of traditional petrol and diesel cars peaked around 2019 and have been falling since. Electric vehicle sales, by contrast, have been doubling roughly every eighteen months globally. The trajectory now resembles a phase change in physics rather than a gradual policy victory.
The momentum is uneven across regions. Norway leads the world dramatically: ninety-eight percent of new cars sold there are electric. China, Europe, and a surprising group of emerging markets — including Thailand, Brazil, and Uruguay — are accelerating quickly. The United States, by contrast, is stalling. A political reversal on climate policy has forced Western automakers to scrap an estimated seventy-five billion dollars worth of all-electric model plans and pivot back toward hybrids. Spain and Italy lag the leaders at just eight to nine percent of new sales.
The tipping-point concept rests on a simple but consequential observation. In China, where most EV makers operate, electric vehicles are already cheaper to buy than comparable petrol cars. That price relationship is the key reason demand survived even when Beijing cut subsidies — researchers found that demand kicked off again rapidly, suggesting the market now stands on its own. UBS analysts use the phrase triple parity to describe the moment when EVs match combustion vehicles on price, range, and charging speed. Once those three conditions are met, the legacy industry faces something close to a cliff.
Emerging-market buyers often have no climate motivation at all. They want modern technology, and their governments want to stop importing expensive foreign oil. Both motivations point to the same product. Transport is the world's second-largest source of greenhouse-gas emissions, so the transition matters enormously for climate targets, but the buyers driving the transition increasingly do not care about that. The shift is happening for non-environmental reasons that turn out to be more durable than environmental ones.
UBS projects EVs and hybrids will hit fifty-eight percent of global sales by 2035, up from twenty-three percent in 2025. Watch for the second-order effects: petrol stations closing, electricity grids straining under charging demand, legacy carmakers like Ford and Volkswagen potentially being acquired or going bankrupt, and a geopolitical scramble over lithium, cobalt, and nickel — the inputs that batteries require. The American gamble of slowing EV adoption to protect existing industries could backfire if it leaves Detroit unable to compete with Chinese champions like BYD and Korean firms like Hyundai in markets where price parity has already arrived.
Source: https://www.ft.com/content/ef33078a-bdd1-48fa-a602-69c38e139d7a?syn-25a6b1a6=1
One in four new cars sold worldwide last year ran on batteries — and researchers now say the shift away from petrol has crossed a threshold that politics alone can no longer reverse.
Electric vehicles hit 25% of global new car sales in 2025, and a paper in Nature Communications argues the world has reached a 'tipping point' — the moment a trend becomes self-sustaining. Sales of traditional petrol and diesel cars peaked around 2019 and have been falling since, while EV sales have doubled every 1.5 years globally.
The momentum isn't uniform. China, Europe, and surprising emerging markets like Thailand, Brazil, and Uruguay are accelerating. The US, meanwhile, is stalling after a political reversal on climate policy — forcing Western carmakers to scrap over $75 billion worth of all-electric model plans and pivot back toward hybrids.
A 'tipping point' in technology means the new product becomes cheaper, better, or more desirable than the old one — and adoption stops needing a push from governments. Think of it less like a policy win and more like a phase change in physics: water doesn't gradually become ice, it crosses a threshold.
The first car you buy will probably be electric — or at least the choice will be obvious by the time you're shopping. This shift also reshapes career maps: oil and traditional auto jobs are shrinking while battery chemistry, charging infrastructure, and software-defined vehicles are booming. And geopolitically, countries that dominate batteries (China today) gain the kind of leverage that oil producers had for the last century.
UBS projects EVs and hybrids will hit 58% of global sales by 2035, up from 23% in 2025. Watch for second-order effects: petrol stations closing, electricity grids straining under charging demand, legacy carmakers like Ford and VW potentially going bankrupt or being acquired, and a geopolitical scramble over lithium, cobalt, and nickel. The US gamble — slowing EV adoption to protect existing industries — could backfire spectacularly if it leaves Detroit unable to compete with BYD and Hyundai abroad.