How Much Are Non-Electric Vehicle Sales Dropping Globally?

José Pontes recently produced one of his excellent, detailed, and — I might add — free monthly reports on plugin vehicle sales around the world. (Support our work providing free content like this by contributing to CleanTechnica on Substack or Stripe.)

One of our readers kindly reminded us that, from a climate and air pollution angle, some critical figures were worth adding: most notably, how much non-electric vehicles declined.

As you might expect, collecting all of the world’s vehicle sales is quite difficult. That’s a lot of countries to gather data from. As a result, different sources come up with different figures.

Completely reverse engineering Jose’s numbers, reader “trackdaze” noted (with slight editing):

if

1.345 million EV sales in 2024 at 20%, then total = 6.7 million, so ICE sales = 5.36 million;
1.643 million EV sales in 2025 at 26%, then total = 6.3 million, so ICE sales = 4.67 million.

ICE sales are melting to the tune of 690K in one month. That would be over 8 million less over a year!

This is big news. Thanks to trackdaze for highlighting this.

Looking at a few different sources, however, the following are three other possibilities that I found.

In the first case:

• 7,763,000 total vehicle sales minus 1,643,041 plugin vehicle sales in July 2025 = 6,119,959 non-plugin vehicle sales;
• 7,257,000 total vehicle sales minus 1,344,027 plugin vehicle sales in July 2024 = 5,912,973 non-plugin vehicle sales;
• So … in this case, fossil fuel vehicle sales actually went up by a couple hundred thousand units.

Alternatively:

• 7,460,000 total vehicle sales minus 1,643,041 plugin vehicle sales in July 2025 = 5,816,959 non-plugin vehicle sales;
• 7,503,000 total vehicle sales minus 1,344,027 plugin vehicle sales in July 2024 = 6,158,973 non-plugin vehicle sales;
• So … in this case, fossil fuel vehicle sales went down by 342,014 units.

Those were based on using total global automotive sales data from other sources and then just subtracting the plugin vehicle sales totals José had provided.

In another scenario, using other data for total vehicle sales in July 2025 and July 2024, the conclusion was a 69,014 reduction in non-plugin vehicle sales.

In short, data varies, and results at this scale in this market can vary a lot. Perhaps I’ll get José on a podcast to talk about the matter and find out more about the challenge of choosing global vehicle sales data to use for such purposes. Having worked on this for about 15 years, I’m sure he has some interesting insights and recommendations.