Omnipotent in Every Way
That China is big in cars and even bigger in electric cars is hardly news. But did you know that the country controls no less than 70 percent of total EV production?
That is at least what the Global EV Outlook 2025, the IEA report that we also mentioned yesterday, states. Perhaps even more impressive is that Chinese car manufacturers independently caused almost the entire 25 percent growth in EV production in 2024. In Europe, production was stable last year and in the US even fewer electric cars were produced than in 2023. China also accounts for 40 percent of total global exports of electric cars and shipped 1.25 million plug-in cars across the border in 2024.
A significant part of this ended up in Europe, because China is the supplier of 60 percent of the 700,000 rechargeable cars that were imported here. Even so, the European Union is a larger exporter than importer of these cars, because in the same year 800,000 left. Although, left: the vast majority of EU exports went to other European countries. The US is and remains a net importer of EVs, despite Tesla. EV imports even increased by 40 percent in 2024, while exports fell by 15 percent according to the IEA report.
You should make a note of the term ‘electric cars’: IEA also counts plug-in hybrids as ‘electric’. Yesterday it became clear that the EV share is larger and that the growth of one usually also means growth of the other. This was certainly the case in China, which, as a buyer of two-thirds of total (PH)EV sales (and now apparently builder of an even larger share), almost single-handedly determines the pace of electrification.