I saw an interesting tweet by Sam Korus from ARK Invest yesterday. He shared that gas-powered car sales in China were down around 4% in 2021, while battery electric vehicle sales were up ~145%. He pointed out that China’s passenger auto sales were up 4.4% to a total of 20.1 million units last year and EVs were basically responsible for that growth. He pointed to an article by the Wall Street Journal and also data from EV-Volumes.com (a frequent CleanTechnica contributor).

WSJ noted that China’s car market broke a 3-year decline thanks to the strong sales of EVs and despite the Covid-19 pandemic and the global chip shortage. What drove the growth were primarily EVs and plug-in hybrid EV sales. The article also predicted that China’s passenger-car market is likely to grow an additional 5% this year, with plug-in vehicles making up at least a quarter of those sales. You can read more here.

According to EV-Volumes, there were a total of 2.65 million new EVs sold during the first half of 2021, which represented a 168% increase compared with 2020. During the first half of 2020, however, the world was experiencing the onset of an unprecedented pandemic. Considering that there is a new variant every time we blink, it sometimes seems that 2020 was 2020 years ago and not just 2.

With that in mind, it’s easy to forget that sales were down drastically that year. That aside, 2021 saw strong increases in EV sales in most of the regions selling them and EV-Volumes noted that the growth rates were 3 to 8 times higher than for the total light vehicle markets. The article noted:

“The share of BEV+PHEV in global light vehicle sales increased from 3 % in 2020 H1 to 6,3 % this year. Europe (EU+EFTA+UK) leads with 14 % EV share for the first 6 months combined, up from 7 % a year ago. A caveat is that half of Europe’s EV sales are PHEVs, compared to 80 % pure electric outside Europe.”