Electric cars status: some uptakes from the International Energy Agency EV outlook 2022

Miguel Pacheco
2 min readJun 23, 2022
Photo by dcbel on Unsplash

Electric vehicle (EV) share of total car sales

2019: 2%
2020: 4%
2021: 8%
2022: around 13%

There are currently over 16.5 million electrical cars (a three-fold increase from 2018)

World’s largest sales of EV by country in 2021

China: 3.3 million (tripled compared to 2020)
Europe: 2.3 million (a two-thirds increase compared to 2020)
USA: 630 000 (doubled from 2020)
China+Europe accounted for 85% of EV car sales in 2021
China+Europe+USA accounted for 95% of EV car sales in 2021

EV models available in the world market

2015: around 90
2022: over 450

EV sales growth in the 2016–2021 period (by compound annual growth rate)

Europe: 61%
China: 58%
USA: 32%

EV share of new car sales in Europe in 2021

All year: 17%
Last quarter: 27% overtaking diesel cars for the first time.
High variation between European countries: in Norway, EV share was 86% compared with Spain with 8%.

Increase in drive range in EV cars (by compound annual growth rate)

Battery Electric Cars (BEV) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Cars (PHEV) perform differently:

BEV range growth:
2015–2021: 9%
But from 2015 to 2019, it was 12%. It leveled from 2019 to 2020 and only grew 3.5% from 2020 to 2021.

PHEV range and its increase are smaller.
2015–2021: 2.7%
However, in 2020–2021 PHEV range increased by 8.5%

Differences in car size in market shares by country
(In this category, market segmentation for EU only, not Europe)

SUV sales dominate the USA market with a 57.1% share.
(EU: 44.6%, China: 44.3%)

Large cars are 19% of the EU market
(USA: 17%, China: 13.1%)

Small cars are 13% of China’s market)
(EU: 9%, USA: 1.6%)

BEV and PHEV market shares 2015–2021
China: 80% BEV
USA: 65% BEV
Europe: 55% BEV

Europe’s high share of PHEVs may result from the European car industry’s lag in developing electric power trains. Larger, higher-end models are sold as PHEVs to take advantage of their knowledge of conventional drive trains and maybe catch in electric power trains and BEV.

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Miguel Pacheco

Architect with scholarly background. Writing on the intersection of Buildings, Energy & Environment with People. Medium Top writer in Energy and Transportation.