Electric vehicle adoption in Europe and China has reached a self-sustaining tipping point, signalling an irreversible shift away from petrol and diesel cars as sales accelerate and conventional vehicle demand declines.

Analysis published in Nature Communications shows the global fleet of electric and hybrid vehicles doubled every one and a half years between 2016 and 2023, with the fastest growth in the EU, China and the US. Meanwhile, combustion engine vehicle sales have fallen steadily since around 2019, and continued to decline after the pandemic, despite wider economic recovery.

Researchers identified key signals of this shift, including rapid gains in EV market share, weakening resilience in fossil fuel vehicle markets, and a growing range of electric models as traditional vehicle options narrow. Price parity is also approaching, with EVs expected to match conventional vehicle costs in Europe and China between 2025 and 2028.

Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter said: “We show for the first time in market data, early opportunity signals before a positive tipping point where uptake of EVs (and decline of fossil-fuelled cars) becomes self-propelling. For markets that haven’t tipped yet, governments and investors can use this signal to indicate where policy efforts and investment can have the biggest bang for their buck. For manufacturers it provides a strong steer to shift their investment and production lines from fossil fuelled cars to EVs, or risk getting left behind.”

Despite the momentum, researchers say stronger policy support will be needed to accelerate progress and reduce costs globally.

Jean-Francois Mercure, director of Exeter Climate Policy, said: “Technological change can happen suddenly and abruptly. For EVs, it is the result of lots of policymaking efforts over the 2000s to 2010s, leading to building up a critical mass, and a tipping point unfolding now, which would be quite hard to reverse.

“Experience shows it was neither just subsidies on EVs nor regulations on their own that achieved building a critical mass in Europe and China, it was combinations of both. Subsidies make EVs affordable, while public procurement and EV mandates (requiring manufacturers to sell a proportion of EVs) increase the availability of EVs, enabling the subsidies to be effective, while carbon taxes played little role, if any.

“Policymakers therefore need to intensify, or at least maintain, those policies in China and Europe to ensure that cost reductions continue, allowing peripheral markets, such as in South-East Asia, Africa and Latin America, to get on board this moving train as soon as possible.”

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