The milestone that took a century to reach
To understand why 49% matters, you have to go back to the moment the petrol car became the default. In the early 1900s, steam and electric cars actually outsold petrol in the US. Then the Model T, cheap oil and the filling station network settled the argument for the next hundred years. Petrol has not been knocked off top spot since.
Now it has been, on a global basis at least. Mobility Global, the auto data firm spun off from S&P Global this year and now trading under that name, puts petrol-only vehicles at 49% of the market between January and June. The three-point fall from 52% in the same period a year ago looks modest. The fall from 73% in 2021 does not.
The numbers behind the shift
The raw figures tell the story more clearly than the percentages. Global petrol-only sales fell 10% year on year to 20.25 million units. Battery-electric sales rose 12% to 6.87 million, taking a 17% share, up three points. Conventional hybrids grew 10% to 7.27 million units, or 18% of the market, which means hybrids outsold pure EVs in the period.
Those reported shares add up to 84%, with the remainder made up of diesel, plug-in hybrids and minor fuels. Crucially, the overall car market shrank by about 5% in the first half, according to the IEA. Petrol-only sales therefore fell roughly twice as fast as the market as a whole. This is not just a story about EVs taking share from a growing pie. The pie got smaller, and petrol took the worst of it.
Why buyers are moving now
The timing is not a coincidence. Fuel prices spiked with the conflict in the Middle East, and buyers went shopping for lower running costs. That is a familiar pattern, but it landed on a market that had already been softened up by cheaper electric metal. Affordable models such as the Renault Gordini 8 Concept: The Electric Reinvention of a Rally Legend show how seriously the French brand is treating the small EV segment, and the production Renault 5 E-Tech has done much of the heavy lifting on European forecourts.
Yoshiaki Kawano, associate director at Mobility Global, frames it as a return to fundamentals.
“EV adoption slowed [around 2024], and hybrids grew due to subsidy cuts and other factors, but higher oil prices have renewed appreciation for EVs’ lower operating costs, and sales are now growing again,”
he said. He goes further on where this ends:
“Few EV buyers return to gasoline vehicles or hybrids, and as prices continue to fall, demand driven by genuine consumer needs rather than subsidies is likely to expand.”
That claim is backed by owner behaviour. A CDK study in July found 94% of EV owners said they will not go back to petrol. Subsidies may start the process, but habit appears to finish it.
Where the change is fastest, and where it is stalling
The global average conceals wildly different regional pictures. Europe posted EV sales up 32% to 1.81 million. Southeast Asia jumped 81% to 350,000. Oceania more than doubled to 110,000.
China is the strangest case. EV sales there actually fell 3% to 3.44 million after incentives were scrapped in January, yet that still represents half the world’s total. Petrol car sales in China dropped 26%, the steepest decline of any region, and in August sales of petrol cars and conventional hybrids fell 40% while battery-electric sales edged up. The Chinese market is not converting to electric so much as abandoning petrol.
North America went the other way, with EV sales down 15%. In the EU, ACEA registration data has battery-electric cars ahead of petrol for the year through August, 1,641,333 to 1,634,733, with petrol down 18.6%. That particular crossover would have seemed fanciful five years ago.
The caveat hiding in the headline
Here is where the century-scale framing needs a health warning. The 49% counts only cars that run on petrol and nothing else. Hybrids are tallied separately, and hybrids without a plug still run entirely on petrol. Add them back in and about 83% of new vehicles sold globally this year came with an engine of some kind. Just 17% burns no fuel at all.
The figure is also a six-month snapshot taken in the middle of an oil shock. Whether the full year stays under half is not guaranteed. If pump prices settle and the incentive picture shifts again, the number could wobble back above the line. The milestone is real, but it is narrower than it sounds.
The US exception
One major market has moved in the opposite direction, and for a very specific reason. The federal tax credit expired, and Cox Automotive expects about 239,000 new EV sales in the third quarter, roughly 6% of the market and down about 45% from the 437,000 sold a year earlier, when buyers rushed to beat the 30 September deadline. Ford reported its EV sales fell 80% in the quarter.
The interesting part is where those buyers went. They did not go back to petrol-only cars. Cox’s Q2 US powertrain mix shows hybrid volume up 23% to a record 16.3% share, with the pure combustion share falling. Electrified vehicles as a whole rose from 22.4% to 23.2% of the market. US pump prices are back around $4.50 a gallon, up 41% from a year ago, which is roughly 85 to 90 pence a litre at current exchange rates. The incentive to plug in has not disappeared, it has just changed shape.
What happens next
Analysts expect EVs to exceed 30% of total vehicle production by 2030, overtaking hybrids and pure combustion vehicles including diesel. That would make the first-half wobble look like the start of something rather than a blip.
Two policy wildcards sit over the forecast. The first is trade. Tariff regimes in the EU and the US are already reshaping which affordable EVs reach which markets and at what price, and further moves in either bloc would feed straight into the 2030 numbers. The second is product. Tesla has reopened reservations for its long-delayed halo model, with the Tesla Roadster Reservations Reopen: $50K Deposit, 2026 Reveal, and Musk’s Wild Claims announcement, a US-dollar deposit for a US-market car, doing more for headlines than for showrooms, but a reminder that the top of the market is still being fought over.
For now, the century-long reign of the petrol-only car has ended on paper. The engine has not gone anywhere, and it will not for years. But for the first time since the 1920s, it no longer commands a majority.
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