EVwire newsletter #160: EV sales up globally — Canada's sudden EV shift — Megacharging arrives

The actual sales number is the absolute best medicine for the EV naysayers. Hit them with the facts, even if they are sure EVs will never take off ‘because xyz is different where we live’.

The 2025 BEV sales numbers are in for most regions now, and while I’m putting together the grand 2025 BEV Sales Report across the ~65 markets (the huge unique thing I do every 6 months), here’s what I’ve gathered for larger regions so far.

PS, as usual, there is not a single plug-in hybrid in my data.
The EV here only means battery electric vehicles (BEVs).

Yes, 2025 ended up being a great year for EV adoption at a global scale. With the help of our good friend José Pontes from CleanTechnica, we were able to fill in the overview across markets:

13,625,897 BEVs were sold globally in 2025!

That is a 26.2% jump from 2024. And that would put the BEV market share of all light-duty vehicle sales in 2025 to 17%!

This means more than every sixth car sold in the world is fully electric… today!
We actually even achieved it every fifth, with 21% BEV share, for the month of December.

Crazy to witness.

Another point of view on this that I like to create: Just 15 years ago, there were 7,200 EVs sold globally for the whole year, but now the same amount of EVs are sold every ~4.5 hours!

With 7,908,563 BEV sales, China again made up 58% of all EV sales in the world (was 58.6% in 2024), so it remains the market to watch for scale.

The price wars have been brutal for the EV makers, but the market keeps growing, with BEVs now making up 33% of the market (and another 21% for plug-in hybrids).

The BEV sales grew 24.7% in China in 2025. We’ll dig deeper into the top EV models and other details in our larger sales report. There’s a surprise addition to the top 3 this year!

A European charging network, Eleport, is one of our business partners for EVwire, and I’m often putting together public research reports for them. So this time we’ve jumped on the EV Sales data in Europe 2025 and created an overview of each country: (link).

EV sales have again been breaking records in nearly every European country, with only 5 out of 31 markets we analysed showing a decline.

2,585,187 battery electric vehicles were sold in Europe in 2025, growing 29,7% after a mostly-stagnating 2024. EV market share in Europe is now 19.5%, or in other words, nearly every 5th car sold in Europe is currently fully electric!

Do note that little milestone there: in December 2025, for the first time ever, BEV sales also overtook petrol car sales in Europe!

It is also quite crazy that we now have eight European countries with more than a 30% market share: Norway (obv), Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands, Malta, Finland, Sweden and Belgium.

My favorite story, however, comes from the leapfrogging nations: the countries with lower historical adoption, but finding their growth gear now that the EV technology, price & infrastructure allow them to jump significantly as they don’t have to go through the problems the now-mature markets had to as early adopters.

Poland came out with a huge growth curve, with 43,311 EVs sold in 2025, growing +161,5% year-over-year. The EV market share also more than doubled, from 3,0% to 7,2% of all sales.

Iceland has just making it’s previous year’s loss even, but Slovenia & Slovakia doubled their sales as well, and Spain, the fifth-largest car market of Europe overall, has now registered over 100k EVs in a single year (101,627), for the first time in its history. Market share is at 8.8% now, so there is a lot more room to grow.

When we publish our global EVwire sales report soon, you’ll find the same kind of leaps happening in the “Rest of the World” regions, too.

Per the data from PwC, the US saw 1,239,560 BEVs sold in 2025, declining -0.3% Year-over-Year (YoY). Per a Cox Automotive report, EV sales dropped by 2% YoY.

2025 was overall the second-best year on record for EV sales in the US, and the EV market share dropped to 7.7% from 8.1% in 2024.

The top models in BEV sales, per kbb, were yet again Model Y (357.5k), Model 3 (192.4k), and then the Chevrolet Equinox (58k).

We already saw this starting in 2024. And in the first half of 2025, as we expected, rhe “Rest of World” already surpassed the US in total EVs sold, as many of the top countries in growth were the likes of Colombia, Indonesia, Türkiye, Ecuador…
Let’s revisit that from our H1 2025 research for a moment:

Early reports show this was also the case for the full 2025 — the “rest of the world” is leapfrogging into the EV future.

Stay tuned for my global EV report. I'm still waiting on some transport registries to publish their December data, and then we are a go. As usual, our EVwire Insider members get it a week or two early, so consider joining us.

Here are some original articles we’ve created recently, this time with our fresh team member Michael doing most of the heavy lifting:

Canada has suddenly made a strong turn in its EV era, after a large drop in EV sales in 2025:

Michael created a great collaboration with the Wheelsboy channel to bring you the Top 5 Chinese EVs that could win over Canadian drivers: (link).

Toyota is finally giving us something to work with… I think? Toyota unveiled a fully electric three-row Highlander BEV for North America. Production will take place in Kentucky, with sales expected to begin in late 2026. (link)

VW showed its new interior language for the future ID. range starting with the ID. Polo… and it features a chance of getting a retro 1980’s instrument cluster up there. (link)

VW also “responded directly to customer feedback by reintroducing physical controls for key functions.”

Kia EV2 was unveiled at the Brussels Auto Show (link):

Volvo came out with the EX60 and EX60 Cross Country, which got a rather positive reception from the early reviewers. We dig into the specs, and Michael even got an indication on the price out of ‘em: (link).

Tesla decided it’s time to sunset the Model S & Model X — they’ll be gone by the end of Q2.

We broke the news on Tesla being ready to enter Estonia and Latvia, and the launch in Slovakia. Oh, and Tesla is now officially also in Africa, starting with Morocco.

Tesla Supercharging for Business program has gone into full swing, with the latest:

There’s so much more happening in the EV realm… can’t wait to ramp our coverage up and bring it all to you!

…wasn’t sure what to name this section, but this should do it. 🤣

In the past few weeks, I’ve had the opportunity to go check out some really exciting EV operations across Europe, so I thought I’d share them with you, too.

Norrköping, Sweden

Not your average truck depot.

We’re used to talking about the EV model specs here, but this time, let’s look at the specs of Alfredsson Energy’s truck charging depot:

This is the future — a logistics company installing 12 heavy-duty vehicle charging points for up to 34-meter vehicles in its base, 400kW-1.2MW MCS charging, coupled with a 2.4 MWh battery energy storage and 2.4 MW grid connection, and 400kWp solar park. As of today, Alfredsson has 7 e-trucks in operation, and the trucks can be loaded and unloaded and charge drivers while the charging is happening.

Alfredsson Energy's charging park is open to everyone, and in addition to charging also offers a truck wash, a driver's lounge with a shower, a microwave, a vending machine, and free Wi-Fi.

Impressive. It is the site where the first known public Megawatt Charging sessions in the world were carried out, and we got to see the Scania, MAN, and Volvo battery electric trucks charge with the MCS right there live.

It’s something crazy to see a truck charging at 1,000A, but to be fair, none of them reached the MW range for now (more about 500-600kW), as the vehicle capabilities are still capped and/or yet to enter production at the final specs.
By the way, we did recently see Tesla engineers charging one of their trucks with 1,206kW, seemingly as firsts in the world.

Later, we analyzed each charging curve of the three truck MCS tests:

I’m a nerd. So I got really excited when I saw an actual double-trailer pulled by the Volvo FH electric truck pull up for a casual charge on one of the other chargers:

Here’s one of my favorite visuals from the event presentations — Volvo electric truck activity heatmap in 2025, shown by Henrik Engdahl, Electromobility Business Development Manager of Volvo Trucks. He showed this heatmap growing year over year, really showcasing the spread of the e-trucks in Europe.

In October, Volvo's electric trucks reached a milestone of more than 250 million kilometers (155.3M miles) since the company launched its first electric models in 2019. Thanks for having me, Kempower!

Antwerp, Belgium

Another trip, a week later was connected to another electric truck that had just been at the same Alfredssons site testing out the MCS: Windrose. Actually, they’ve been completing interoperability tests with pretty much any CPO deploying MCS in Europe so far:

Windrose is what you could call the usurper, the new entry to shuffle the deck of cards.

Given that the whole industry, from logistics companies and other stakeholders to investors and the media, is cautious of such new entry to the space, especially into electric trucking, Windrose is truly starting as an underdog here.

I would reckon it would have been seen as even more “wild” if the Tesla Semi hadn’t already looked so similar, with the same bullet-train type of design and central seating position. While Windrose Semi looked like a copy of Tesla’s at first, the recent Tesla redesign, adding the lightbar up front, now made it look even more similar to Windrose, which did that part first:

I’ve seen the WIndrose being reported as struggling, and I’ve seen them have unexpected wins. My standing about the company, not that it matters too much, is optimistic.

Having taken a ride in an actual Windrose truck in Hannover, Germany, already in late 2024 (one of the few prototypes back then), I was very surprised how they got there quickly. We of course know that ‘prototypes are easy, production is hard’. I can’t help but root for them to make it.

Wen Han, the founder of Windrose, was kind enough to invite me to join their investor/stakeholder day in Antwerp, Belgium, where they have their European HQ. They held a signing ceremony at the Port of Antwerp for an assembly plant, “Windrose Park Antwerp,” along the Noorderlaan in Antwerp.

With phase one completed by the end of the year, Windrose is to assemble vehicles for the European market and also establish departments for research & development and after-sales.

Windrose has just recently said they are planning on delivering 600 trucks in Europe in the next 12 months. Very hard target to reach, we’ll check back in 12 months.

As of today, Windrose has been working on bringing the electric truck to market for the past 4 years, spent $99M on all the development (all-in cost, according to them), has 300+ patents (2 granted in the US), trucks on 5 continents, 24 countries.

As far as I understand, there are 31 trucks deployed across the countries so far, with 6 in the US.

What’s notable about it all is what the truck can actually do: 670km (416mi) at 49 tons (98k lbs) has been validated, and they are showing actual operations in actual routes working.

The Windrose Global E700 is now 100% EU-homologated and officially registered in Belgium — I saw the first one with fresh licence plates myself

And not only that, but it’s also homologated in the US and in China, which should be the first single truck to achieve it since ~WWII. The benefits of having a central seating position helps, I’d imagine.

There’s a lot more to talk about, like their on-the-road operation routes completed across the world, and I took the chance to sit down for an actual podcast interview with the founder, Wen Han.

Editing it and sharing the first part with you all soon! All I can say is that Wen is refreshingly transparent about all aspects of the business and how they’re building it.

Málaga, Spain

This isn’t news for tens (hundreds?) of thousands of Tesla owners in the US and a few other countries, but it sure is for us in Europe. While I’ve relocated to Spain for a few months, I couldn’t help but jump on the opportunity of scheduling an “FSD (Supervised) Ride-Along” from Tesla.

The Tesla owners in Europe have been living with Autopilot, an old stack that is years behind in development. This is and feels completely different.

They do these ride-alongs in 6-7* countries in Europe now, as a way of showing (potential) customers and EV geeks like myself what’s coming soon.

And it truly is, finally, as Tesla is working with RDW in the Netherlands to get the legislation side done. Tesla says that the regulations are the only thing stopping them from rolling out, and having experienced this ride now… I believe them. Some anecdotal evidence about the technology from my limited ride:

It handled the Spanish roundabouts with ease, even the randomness of it when we had someone cut in from across the lines, etc.

It was overly cautious in one of the pedestrian crossings, showing a yellow light, then realized there was nothing to stop for and carried on.

The mindblowing part for me was when I didn’t even see the car pulling out from behind the truck, yet the Tesla was already braking. As we got closer, that car started reversing and our robocar immediately realized this and accelerated to carry on.

When we arrived at our mid-destination, without interventions that is, it offered a parking spot for us on the screen and just by tapping it, it autoparked in place.

There was one incident on our way back, though.

I sadly was not filming at the moment before arriving back at the Tesla showroom, but our robocar did not evade a small branch from a tree sticking out to the road, and hit it with the sideview mirror. This was a strong enough branch that looked like it could have scratched the paint of the mirror, and the employee was also surprised by this moment.

The car just carried on, and while this wasn’t a real safety incident, it does fall under rather reckless behavior that you perhaps wouldn’t do with your car…

All in all, I was surprised by how smooth the overall operations are here in Europe. And that’s also what I’m seeing from the reports all across Europe, and even, surprisingly so, in the media coverage.

Turns out you actually can design a vehicle to act anywhere as a human driver would, by training and vision only. Tesla does do some localization for the models to work correctly per region, but the core technology is there and ready.

I checked and the ride was running on FSD v14.1.7, while the US is just seeing the v14.2.2.5 rolling out. The Tesla employee said that the car is specially marked for regulations and just one specific vehicle for the region of Andalusia was there to give the rides.

FSD (Supervised) is live in a handful of countries, and mostly doesn’t still allow for forever-interventionless rides, but the latest versions have actually allowed for some crazy milestones, like David Moss going 12,000 miles before intervention was needed, including a coast-to-coast in the US, and even Alex Roy completing the e-cannonball route fully autonomously without any interventions.

And now, there are a handful of robotaxis actually operating without supervision (and no, no chase cars either) in Austin in a limited area. At least 7 Tesla robotaxis ride around as intended, with the other 34 Teslas in the service there still having Supervisors in the passenger seat.

In the Bay Area, Tesla has 297 vehicles in service, all with someone in the driver’s seat supervising for now. There are now also 25 Cybercabs seen on the roads for testing. I recommend checking out the robotaxitracker.com for a live user-reported view of the growing fleet.

* Please forgive me, this 6-7 joke fever has caught my kids as well…